"To some extant [the short-story cycle's] central components are...

"To some extant [the short-story cycle's] central components are best described through critical triangulation: a cycle is less unified than a novel but has much greater coherence and thematic integrity that a mere collection of unrelated stories. It can focus on the development of a single character, but it is more likely to involve scenes devoted to a series of characters who interact with each other throughout the episodes, so that the major character of one story may function in the background of another. In the history of the genre, the most persistent continuity in the form has been in setting, so that all of the short works constituting a cycle occur in the same general location, with prominent landmarks recurring throughout, tying the events to an enduring sense of place . . . " (17)." --from "Introduction" in James Nagel's The American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre.

What are some of the elements that give Love Medicine unity and coherence?