When I realized how many of the stories from The Immigrant and the Outlaw were eventually produced by Our American Stories, I cautiously asked Lee Habeeb if he’d write a foreword for it. Cautiously because this founder and host of Our American Stories is a writer, a columnist for Newsweek magazine, a popular speaker, and a very busy man!
He said he’d be glad to do it, and I think he even enjoyed it. His foreword is longer than any of the stories in the book, and such fun to read. I posted the first part earlier. Here’s the rest of it:
Early on, she captures our senses with an essay called “Our Mysterious Moon and its Complicated Cotillion.” This may be my favorite part of the beautiful short story: “Two full moons are my sister’s favorites. One is the Iowa State Fair Moon. That’s what we call it. There is something mesmerizing about finding our way around the fairgrounds at sunset as an elegant full moon looms up over the southeast fence. Her other favorite is September’s Harvest Moon, its iridescent silence just above the horizon casting nebulous shadows with reflected light.”
Her essays in the Chapter “Childhood on a Farm” are remembrances of her childhood time spent in barns—the sounds, the sights and the smells. And her lamentation that so many barns around her home—and across the country, too—are being lost to lack of use, changing farming priorities, or encroaching development and commerce.
There are beguiling short stories on roller-skating in the house and an upright piano. There is even a poignant essay on a flower: “The Heavenly Blue Morning Glory, one of summer’s late bloomers, is spectacular now. In the spring and summer it’s a rather disappointing vine. The puny vines and anemic leaves inch up the chicken wire arranged around the pole of a bird feeder, but it takes nearly half the summer to reach window height. About then, the first nearly four-inch blooms open—truly a heavenly blue.”
There are heartfelt stories about Bosnians, immigrants who sought refuge after the brutality of the Balkan War in the 1990s. And who settled, some of them, in and around Joy’s hometown: “I’m struck by how very much alike we humans are, no matter where on the planet we were born, reminding us all of our common humanity—and our common story as refugees from some foreign land or another. We are indeed all God’s children. Our needs are the same—food, shelter, clothing, companionship, love, worthy work to make a living. These young immigrants are here for the very same reasons our own ancestors fled their birth countries and came to America. Iowa represents hope to these displaced young people . . . Iowa isn’t exactly heaven yet, but halcyon compared to their war-scarred homeland.”
My favorite short story can be found in the chapter “Discovering Ancestors,” which chronicles the life of a small hometown cemetery: “Under skeletons of winter trees, they lie here beneath the frozen ground. Six generations of ancestors in the same small cemetery, nestled in the far corner of Dallas County, Iowa. Why is it that each family has a caretaker of old pictures, family lore—one person who wanders in cemeteries, even in winter, wondering about those who share bits of DNA? I wonder why they risked everything to settle at the small dot on the map known as Dexter, Iowa. Yet even among these barren stones, I carry glimpses of personalities alive with family and community.”
It’s a very specific story—and such a universal one, too. It reminds us all that we sprang from someone else’s dreams and hopes. We landed where we landed because of choices prior generations made.
In the end, what Joy does as beautifully as the very best writers in the country is take us on a journey. And though specific to her neck of the woods, her family, her town, and the generation in which she was born, her stories carry with them a universality that’s moving. In her stories, we see and hear our own.
I hope you enjoy this wonderful series of short stories as much as I did. I am most fortunate to call Joy a friend. A fellow writer. And fellow storyteller.
Lee Habeeb, Creator and Host, Our American Stories, Nationally Syndicated Radio Program
Lee has been such an encourager through the years, and so generous. You might enjoy reading his tribute to his father from a June 2025 issue of Newsweek.