The stories in Meatball Birds and Seven Other Stories--The Canadian, Royce Hare, Home, Meatball Birds, The Falls Brawl, Conrad Forester, Miss Hutchinson, and The Horse--add more details to the lives of the Cockburn family and other residents of Menninger, North Dakota, the fictional town first introduced in the novel The Song Is Ended and continued in the novel The Dark Between The Stars. They are visits to small town life from the early years of the twentieth century to the 1960s.