He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west toward Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work. Until his retirement in 2000, Dr. MacLeod spent all of his winter months as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier University, the University of New Brunswick, and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre. He has published two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986). In 2000, these two books, accompanied by two previously unpublished stories, were brought together into a single-volume edition entitled Island: The Collected Stories.
