Oak Park and River Forest High School English teacher Brendan Lee published his debut novel, "The Sawtooth Chronicles," on May 12 after five years and about 12 longhand drafts.

The 188-page paperback follows 12 men at a wellness camp in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. Their three-week program gets upended when the COVID-19 pandemic hits in March 2020, stranding them together. They pass the time gathering around a firepit and telling stories.

As first reported by The Trapeze, the OPRF student newspaper, Lee said the stories are "fictionalized variations" of events from his own life. Eight of the characters hail from Chicago. Lee called the book a "love letter to the South Side of Chicago."

Lee was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and moved to the South Side in the middle of sixth grade, according to his author biography. He grew up in the Holy Redeemer parish and attended St. Rita High School, where he played football and basketball. His father was an ironworker. His mother was an emergency room nurse.

He has taught English in Oak Park for more than two decades. He studied at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and earned a graduate degree from Humboldt State University in California. His post-graduate research at Yale University, University College Dublin and Oxford University focused largely on James Joyce's "Ulysses," under the mentorship of Swiss Joyce scholar Fritz Senn.

Lee said oral storytelling, rooted in his Irish heritage, is central to his personality. He described the novel as a conversation with writers, books, poems and people in his life who have died. He said the book could have taken another four or five years but worried more time would mean more obsessing over perfection.

Tom Durkin, a literature professor at Marquette University and a friend of Lee's, said the novel made him recognize people they both know in the characters. "Many people aspire to write a novel, plan to write a novel, put off writing a novel. Mr. Lee did it!" Durkin told The Trapeze.

Lee has a second book written, "The Forked Island," about the Irish island where his grandmother grew up. Its publication status is unclear.

"The Sawtooth Chronicles" is independently published and available through Bookshop.org and Amazon.