Jeff LeJeune, Postmarked Baltimore

July 18th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

LeJeune_Author_Photo[1]I met Jeff LeJeune on GoodReads website, a place where writers and readers can share reviews, recommendations, and most anything. 

A Bit About Jeff LeJeune:  Jeff LeJeune played basketball in high school and then for two seasons at McNeese State University before a deadly disease redirected the course of his life. He is now a professional novelist (The Final Chase and Postmarked Baltimore) and a columnist for Writers News Weekly. He teaches at St. Louis Catholic High School in Lake Charles, LA, where he was recently named a Claes Nobel Educator of Distinction.

Postmarked Baltimore (Book Jacket Summary): On New Year’s Eve, 1989, Father Perry Burns is sitting in his study, accompanied by a mysterious stranger. Perry has just received a letter from his former sweetheart, whom he jilted years earlier after making a terrible decision. He joined the priesthood to hide from his emotions, but now he finds himself recalling, almost reliving, his checkered past. Will the mysterious stranger win the fight for Father Burns’ soul, or will the struggling priest denounce his false life and return to Baltimore to answer to the woman he has always loved?

Carrie:  Jeff, would you be willing to open up and allow us to get to know you beyond your books? Post baltimore

Jeff:  Growing up the last of five children, I had both the privilege and the burden of watching my older siblings. One current throughout my family’s life was basketball. I followed my brothers’ footsteps and worked hard to be an All-State basketball player in high school, earning a spot on the McNeese State University basketball team.

I sat out my first year in college and then joined the team my second. It was rough; constant pain in my knees, achilles tendons, not to mention three badly sprained ankles made it impossible to compete like I wanted to. I turned to drinking and the night life of a college athlete to assuage my frustration in knowing that my basketball career, everything I had worked so hard to attain as an athlete, was seemingly out of my control.

On a night in February, 1999, everything changed. I was working on some homework in the computer lab at school when suddenly the most violent of shakes hit me. I tried to sleep that night, bundled up in layers upon layers of clothes, but I couldn’t. I know now that had I gone to sleep, the poison in my blood would have reached my heart and killed me. I didn’t fall asleep, though, and my trainer and assistant coach took me to the emergency room. My hand was swelling, and that night was maybe the worst of my life. The pain was relentless, and the nurses could not administer any stronger medication without the approval of a doctor. I didn’t know how fatal this disease could have been at the time as I do now, but I finally passed out that night somehow knowing my life would never be the same again. I spent the next two weeks in the hospital. Doctors were in and out initially, and the head of the Center of Disease Control said he’d never seen a pathogen take over somebody’s body so quickly. Monday afternoon I’m practicing with the basketball team. Five hours later I’m in the hospital fighting for my life. I changed in those two weeks in the hospital. I watched my mother cry and the outpouring of support I had from family and friends. I realized that I didn’t like the direction my life was taking, and decided that it was my obsession with succeeding in basketball and making my family proud that was taking me away from everything important in my life. I quit the team that spring. They say quitters never win. Well, I know with full confidence that had I not quit, I would have lost and lost big. I would not be the person I am today. I am now a teacher at a Catholic high school and a writer. At the core of everything I do is a passion for life and a belief that there is something greater guiding us. The work my students and I do in the classroom can be magical when everyone works together toward a common goal. My characters in my stories must go through the same things I went and still go through, because it is through them that I work through some of the issues I still struggle with. God can’t do it alone. I can’t do it alone. I believe that one must constantly be working toward a balance of pushing hard and having faith in God to be truly successful in life and beyond.Carrie: What’s the first thing you can remember writing? Short stories as a kid? A poem for a girlfriend? Jeff:  My poetry is not very good so maybe that’s why I could never hold onto a girlfriend. It was actually short stories written as a kid. A friend of mine and I took turns writing horror stories that were about a loose-leaf page’s length in early elementary school. This experience is fictionalized in the second novel where Perry recounts his need to “win” in these story-writing exchanges with his friend. Fortunately I was never as peevish as my character. Anyway, I continued to write little stories chronicling sporting events I watched on television through the ninth grade. After that I got cool and got a car and started focusing on my basketball training more and just lost touch with that side of me. Until, while riding a lawn mower back home one summer day, it suddenly hit me that I wanted to be a teacher.

Carrie:  Who are your favorite authors?

Jeff:  I was trained with the classics and I largely focus on those in my class so it’s difficult to comment on some of the contemporary authors. Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence is one of those books that struck my soul because of my recognition of one of its characters. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is my favorite novel, and her style—elegant and succinct at the same time—has influenced my writing. I was into Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne for a long time and still like their penchant for colorful symbolism; the battle between the self and the self’s shadow in their work is another obvious influence if one ever reads my work. Some local authors that have added nobly to the world of literature are Rick Norman, Neil Connelly, and John Ed Bradley.

Carrie:  If you could go back in time, what advice would you offer yourself about being a writer?

Jeff:  One thing would be to not let my personal life get in the way of the revising process. Once the book goes to press, that’s pretty much it, unless you become really famous and can dictate whether or not you want to run a second edition of your book. I allowed some emotional distress to distract me and it made me apathetic to the changes that I needed to make. Another thing that I would do, something I did well with, I think, in the second book, is to let go of some material. Sometimes I spend so much time working on a story or even a paragraph that I don’t want to delete it when the revising time comes, no matter how much I know it doesn’t belong. I think that’s the creator’s nightmare, to destroy that which took so long to create, but it must be done. A tip to beginning writers that helped me get over this: create a “cuts” file that you can cut and paste into. That way, you can convince yourself that you may “use it later” in this novel or another. Even though you know deep down inside that you’re never going back to that file again, you’ll know that at least you didn’t have to completely dispose of it. It’ll always be there, never to be read, but there.

Carrie:  What is the last book you read and why did you read it?

Jeff:  I finished Paul Austere’s Travels in the Scriptorium for a review I had to write in my graduate-level class. I re-read I Am Legend in order to be refreshed on the story enough to teach it. The last book I read for pure pleasure was It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, a memoir written by John Ed Bradley. All three are books I recommend.

Book Excerpt (from Ch. 2)

As the months passed, though, his feelings mutated. It was odd, even Father Burns acknowledged, that the more he worked with the couple leading up to their wedding day, the more they started to resemble him and Noel. It wasn’t so much a physical thing as it was an intrinsic quality in the two that moved them toward each other even when they were moving away. It was how he and Noel had been. The flutter of the girl’s eyes, the youthful flirting of the boy, it was all the little things that made love perfect. Such a bitter pill, jagged and exact in its scrape, only sharpened the more he watched them. There were moments when he couldn’t wait to see the couple because remembering wasn’t so bad; there were also times when he couldn’t wait for the wedding to be over. Remembering fond times usually brings sweet nostalgia to the normal man; for Father Burns, though, remembering could be like fingernails across a chalkboard. In a matter of weeks what he had worked so hard for years to erase was materializing again in the form of one woman’s name. And the chalk kept writing it over and over again on the chalkboard. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he said to himself, still staring at the letter, trying to believe against all sobriety that the letter in front of him wasn’t postmarked Baltimore.

Website:  www.thefinalchase.com

There Are 27 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Celeste on 23 July 2008:

    Your book is on my List of Books to Read. I am curious about your choice of a Catholic priest as your main character. Why did you choose a person in a religious vocation?

  2. Comment by Jeff LeJeune, author on 23 July 2008:

    My choice of character and the complexity of his moral decision I think is what makes this book special. It is bold because it doesn’t blink. Is it “becoming a priest” that gets you to heaven, or “being priestly?” I quote those terms because I don’t mean them literally, as in the question can only apply to a Catholic priest. In matters of faith, I think there continues to be discord because people who don’t believe in something greater than ourselves are influenced too heavily by those “priests” out there; again, I don’t mean this literally. I feel like if more people were “priestly” and treated others the way they would want to be treated, instead of “acting like a priest,” we wouldn’t have near the misunderstanding with which we are now burdened. As a faith-based person, I get so frustrated when assumptions are made about my faith because of things learned through people who really don’t understand faith in the first place. And the irony is that they claim to understand it in full, which is a direct contradiction to what faith entails. I don’t mind saying I don’t understand some things, but I believe that that’s what makes my faith strong. To put it simply, I wanted to explore this phenomenon with the most extreme example in my Catholic faith possible, and that was a priest. I guess I could have chosen the Pope, but that wouldn’t have been believable :).
    Thanks for the question. I hope you enjoy the book.

  3. Comment by Michelle on 23 July 2008:

    I’ve read your first book The Final Chase and was absolutely mesmerized by it. Will definitely read this one. I’m sure I can expect the same depth and complexity, but give me a sneak peek on the mood/style of the story (without giving away too much!). Is it a romance/mystery/inner conflict…?

  4. Comment by Ginger on 23 July 2008:

    How do you approach the plot of your stories? Do you outline and then work out the story in detail, or do you leave the ‘real details’ for a revision phase afterwards.

  5. Comment by Jeff LeJeune, author on 23 July 2008:

    Thank you, Michelle, for reading The Final Chase. I wish I could be so mesmerized by it :).
    I do, however, really like what I’ve done with Postmarked Baltimore. Yes, there is depth and complexity, but it’s not a 1000-piece puzzle like The Final Chase was. It does have some element of the supernatural in it, but it is more incidental than central to the story.
    Postmarked has been compared to Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook in that there are very serious times when the main character is in his current state as a priest and very romantic times when he flashes back to his youth and his relationship with Noel. There are elements of all 3 things you listed: it is a romance because the flashback shows Perry and Noel’s tragic love story; it is a mystery because the reader doesn’t know what Father Burns will do now that he has this letter from Noel 15 years later; and it certainly involves inner conflict because the main character is divided between his loyalties to the church and the love in his heart.
    I appreciate your interest in the book. Hope you enjoy it.

  6. Comment by Celeste on 23 July 2008:

    Honestly I was turned off by the fact that you were using the Catholic priest, but these are my issues :). Your response surprised me and I think it is wonderful. We are of the same mind-set when it comes to a person living a good life (doing the right thing) no matter what they do in life . . . beautiful beautiful!

  7. Comment by Jeff LeJeune, author on 23 July 2008:

    Hi, Ginger. I am the writer who tries to get all scenes exactly how I want them before moving on. I just feel like doing too much later can open a writer up to inconsistencies in the plot. That said, I go through many revisions before the final version is ready for print. With Postmarked, I made two major additions to the book after it sat for six months and before I even sent it off to publishers. After that, I went through two more major revisions before one more copy editing phase. The final product of about 48,000 words is a far cry from my 32,000 word version when I finished three or four years ago.
    As far as outlining goes, no, I don’t write any outlines. I kind of know what I want to do in my head, but different experiences from day to day in my own life sometimes lead my characters in a different direction than I’d originally intended. That gives life to the character and allows them to breathe, making them more believable.
    Thanks for the question. I hope you enjoy the book.

  8. Comment by Cindi on 23 July 2008:

    How quickly our lives can change! The cover of his book is wonderful! It was be a good book to read and see what Father Burns decided to do with his life. Cindi

  9. Comment by Jeff LeJeune, author on 23 July 2008:

    To Celeste: judging a book by its collar, eh? :)

  10. Comment by Jeff LeJeune, author on 23 July 2008:

    Hi, Cindi. Glad you like the cover. Though I wasn’t thrilled with it at first, it has grown on me. My publisher’s thought it added a mysterious elegance to the story, and they wanted to entice people to want to open it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the unwrapped gift when you get there.

  11. Comment by Jeff LeJeune, author on 23 July 2008:

    To Celeste: what you said got me thinking. Here’s how I look at religion. It is one way, and a really good way, to the truth. But it is not the truth in itself. It works for me. But I also realize it can’t work for everyone. I don’t believe people who are not Christians but are genuinely good people are going to hell. Obviously I believe that Christ works through even those people, even though they don’t believe he is the Messiah. I must say that I do believe that, handled well, religion is the best way to living our lives to the fullest spiritually, emotionally, and physically, but each person has to decide that on their own. It’s like taking the Interstate vs taking the back roads on a trip somewhere. Some days you take one, some days you take the other. Both have their upsides, both have their drawbacks. But the bottom line is that you get there. The beautiful thing about the Catholic religion is that we don’t judge, and so I do not judge those that don’t follow it. Anyone that does will be subject to judgment himself when that time comes, Catholic or not.

  12. Comment by Celeste on 23 July 2008:

    Many people hold true to their religion, which I think is a beautiful thing . . . for them.

    In my personal experiences however, the religion that I grew up in was devoid of God, but full of judgements, rules, etc. I turned in my dogma for spirituality and what has become my true connection w/ God. Since my decision to go this way, I have been hesitant to look into or consider being part of any religion or church.

    I guess this is why I was originally somewhat hesitant about whether I could enjoy your book. It is encouraging to me to ‘meet’ and ‘talk’ with someone that can take part in a religion (with its rules, traditions, etc) AND be connected spiritually with God, something I struggled with and still struggle with today.

    I am now truly looking forward to not only reading your book, but also thinking more indepth of the actions and decisions I have made in my life with regard to organized religions. I am afraid you may have planted a seed. Thank you. I enjoyed our exchange.

  13. Comment by Ginger on 23 July 2008:

    I agree with the comments re: the cover. I like the simplicity and mystery of it … makes me want to open it!

  14. Comment by Keith on 23 July 2008:

    I have to agree with Michelle on your first book, The Final Chase. Not a simple story, but mesmerizing and thought-provoking. Will that,thought-provoking topics, be a common theme in Postmarked Baltimore and your future books?

    I am curious because you are a teacher. Isn’t provoking your students to think part of your job?

  15. Comment by Jeff LeJeune, author on 23 July 2008:

    Hi, Keith. Yes, I’d like to think I provoke my students to think deeply, and I’ve found some success at it. Some failures, of course, those that don’t want to be inspired, just want it given to them. But for the most part, the young people have responded to the class’s design. I guess it’s a situation where I can’t escape from who I am. I teach with passion and depth, and so my stories will have this inherent quality as well. The Final Chase was thought-provoking like a puzzle is thought-provoking. The reader is constantly having to re-evaluate and try to piece the mystery together. With Postmarked, there is less piecing, but probably just as much mystery. The mystery is more centrally located on Father Burns rather than being scattered like it was in the first novel. I think this makes his character even more powerful and tragic, and as one reader says, you may not know whether you should love him or hate him.

  16. Comment by Casey Vincent on 4 August 2008:

    I have also read Mr. LeJeune’s first book and enjoyed it. I read mostly science fiction and fantasy-fiction novels and found that The Final Chase had many great visual concepts. I cannot wait to get my copy of Postmarked Baltimore.

    I am wondering if there are some situations in his classroom settings that have motivated any of the characters or situations that he writes about.

  17. Comment by Jeff LeJeune on 7 August 2008:

    Thanks, Casey. The visual concepts were so paramount because of the dream element of the book. The images in our dreams are so vivid that I wanted to do that in The Final Chase.

    As far as the classroom goes, I’m sure there are some incidental things that impact my view of the human race in general that goes into my characters. I don’t think that’s avoidable. In addition to this, though, my main character in Postmarked is a high school English teacher, and there are a few scenes in the book that show him at school, one with a substitute teacher, one with a fellow faculty member, and one climatic scene in the classroom itself that kind of shifts the story into its final gear toward the end of the story.

  18. Comment by Heather on 1 December 2008:

    I was wondering if you ever seek advice from others about characters, plot, etc. during your writing process?

  19. Comment by Jeff LeJeune on 17 December 2008:

    Hi, Heather. Forgive the length of time it has taken me to get back to you. I do not seek advice from others, and I really should. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that with teaching being such a full time job, when I write, it’s my time. It’s not that I don’t want advice, it’s just that the thought of seeking it is just far too daunting when all I want to do is write when I finally actually find time to do it.

    Thanks for the question, and for your interest in the writing process.

  20. Comment by Trent on 5 January 2009:

    when will you write a book about your great experiences at Hanson High School?

  21. Comment by jefflejeune on 6 January 2009:

    Hi, Trent. I’m actually working on that book right now. I’m writing it in serial form, posting one installment per week at one of my blog sites:

    http://www.storiesbyjefflejeune.wordpress.com

    Maybe you can follow it there.

    Did you go to Hanson?

  22. Comment by Trent on 7 January 2009:

    Yeah, class of 91. Like the stories. 4 errors, really? good gosh. At least you didnt have Melvin for a coach.

    I am sure you love the sentence fragments. Great Hanson education right there.

  23. Comment by Jeff LeJeune on 7 January 2009:

    Trent Michelle?

    Actually, Melvin was my coach :-). I have to say, man, that he got me through that time in baseball. It wasn’t just the baseball. As you’ll see in coming installments of the story, I let alot of things pile up and get to me. Too weak to handle it. No question helped make my junior and senior years awesome, though, I must say.

  24. Comment by Jeff LeJeune on 7 January 2009:

    By the way, I put a few fragments in there. No worries! :-)

  25. Comment by Trent on 7 January 2009:

    I would like you to use an alter name please. I would hate to have my high school fans find me. J/k. I’ll keep with the stories.

  26. Comment by Jeff LeJeune on 7 January 2009:

    I am using alternate names, except for mine, Denny’s and the rest of my family. You think a guy named Jackson Biel went to Hanson? :-)

  27. Comment by Trent on 7 January 2009:

    You should have a catcher named Cooter Brown.

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