Praise for
Have I Got a Story for You
“Reading Have I Got A Story For You is like a wind-swept day of beachcombing – a jewel of beach glass here, a water-carved rock there, an interesting twist of driftwood – until your pockets are full of treasures and stories. In this gem of a book, Hope McLeod masterfully weaves together the wave-tossed strands of humble heroism, hidden talent, boundless love, and just plain grit scrolled deep into the hearts and lives of the lake-charmed few who call this coast home. If stories are the threads that bind us together as a community, Hope’s book is the cleat hitch that holds us fast to this place and to each other.”
– Jeff Rennicke, author of Jewels on the Water: Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands and contributor to Backpacker, Reader’s Digest, and National Geographic Traveler
“Good journalism is about finding truth. Across her years as a reporter for the Bayfield County Journal, Hope McLeod has found beautiful truths in many hidden places and shining in so many unlikely faces. This collection of some of her best articles offers stories of hope, courage, humor, sadness, and certainly wisdom. With luminous prose, a huge heart, and a journalist’s eye for detail, McLeod has created a treasure chest filled with people whose ordinary appearance masks extraordinary lives.”
– William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author of the Cork O’Connor series
“Every community needs a storyteller, and in her new collection of stories from the Bayfield peninsula Hope McLeod grasps the role and runs with it. These are tales of artists and eccentrics, of life, love and occasional loss, of people searching for beauty or, in one case, for UFOs, characters all who together make up the rich fabric of life along the edge of Lake Superior.”
– Dennis McCann, former columnist for Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and author of This Superior Place: Stories of Bayfield and the Apostle Islands
For someone with both passion and reverence for Lake Superior and for authentic writing – the kind that honors place and the people who inhabit it — Hope McLeod’s anthology, Have I Got a Story For You, is a gift.
– Journalist Jacqui Banaszynski, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing
“In these times of techno-tribalism, how grateful I am for chroniclers like Hope McLeod and the record she keeps of the quieter moments, quieter places, and quieter citizens. Here are the rewards of civility and civilization if we will keep them.”
– Michael Perry, New York Times bestselling author of Population: 485, Truck, Coop, Visiting Tom, and Montaigne in Barn Boots
“Hope’s body of work with The Ashland Daily Press and The Bayfield County Journal on the arts, literature and music has been extraordinary, and greatly appreciated by the entire Chequamegon Bay community.”
– Theron O’Connor, owner of Apostle Islands Booksellers in Bayfield, Wisconsin
By Hope McLeod
HUMBLE HEROISM. HIDDEN TALENT. BOUNDLESS LOVE.
Meet the characters in, Have I Got a Story for You, a collection of 35 feature stories and 49 B & W photographs by Hope McLeod, an award-winning journalist, poet, and songwriter from Washburn, Wisconsin. Previously published in the Bayfield County Journal and the Ashland Daily Press from 2012-2107, these spirited stories that depict a unique community along the South Shore of Lake Superior are newly edited to outlast the events reported on.
Contact Hope
(715) 373-5898