BY KAREN BOSSICK

A former Sun Valley employee will discuss his new book “Reaching Montaup” at 6 tonight—Thursday, Sept. 14—at Ketchum’s Community Library.

John DePasquale, who wrote under the pseudonym J. Dominic, took years to complete the novel.

The novel revolves around a young “plate-in-the-head” boy named Jate who suffered a brain injury in a childhood traffic accident in Montaup, the seat of the once-reigning Wampanoag Indian nation. But he gets far more than people realize and he attempts to regain clarity through his out-of-joint writing—right down to colorfully distorted regional history and the “hush-hush cross-your heart” secrets of the living.

When his boyhood friend is molested by a local priest, “parents conspire, mobsters appear, an avenging angel from Providence descends and Montaup’s brutal colonial past reawakens,” the cover of the book says in tantalizing language.

DePasquale, who now lives in Boise, began working on the novel after leaving his childhood home in Rhode Island to work for Sun Valley Resort. Here, he operated lifts, managed a restaurant, worked on trail crew, performed and directed local theater and served as the last officially posted U.S. Forest Service fire lookout atop Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.

John's work received a boost in 1993 when he met author Tom Spanbauer at the Community Library and became persuaded to join Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writers Workshop at Portland State University.

Having earned a bachelor’s degree in communication arts at Lindenwood College in St. Charles, Mo.,  DePasquale also stage-managed and floor-directed TV studio shows at NBC, ABC and CBS affiliates in Providence and Boston.

He earned his second bachelor’s degree in 1989 and went on to teach drama and English in several Idaho public schools.