Se?n Virgo knows that the act of story-telling is hardwired into human consciousness and that the well-told story can appear in various shapes and sizes. The stories in Dibidalen are directed by this knowledge. Some stories employ verse fable and folktale interchangeably to forging links to a preliterate oral culture. Other stories employ the power of allegory and traditional transcendentalism to allow nature to open a deeper understanding of human affairs. In these stories the reader must grapple with how to personalize archetypal symbols in order to understand a woman's fate, or assign meanings to the actions of a doubting priest to realize his destiny. In a blended mix of fantasy and magical realism the everyday is fused with the illusory, the mythical, and the morbid as traditional distinctions between what happened and what we think happened blur. Finally, in Virgo's most extrapolated stories we are led on with the fractures and abstractions of the narratives that redirect each story's unexpected conclusion. The result is a fascinating dance between reader and text that is as rewarding as it is challenging, reminding us of what Ana's Nin meant when she said, 'We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.'