About David Marion Wilkinson
My Formative Years
I’m a fifth-generation native of Arkansas, born in 1957 in Malvern, Hot Springs County, to a Presbyterian minister and his wife. My struggling family relocated to Houston and attended Sharpstown High School, where I was mentored by two of my English teachers, Margaret Stork and Freda Katz, both of whom encouraged me to write. I worked every afternoon and weekends for an aging but charismatic and world-weary golf pro and raconteur who told wonderful stories of life in East Texas, serving as a bomber pilot during WWII, and his experiences on the professional tour during the era of Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Harvey Pennick.
Within days of my 18th birthday, I began classes at the University of Texas at Austin and covered my college expenses by roughnecking offshore in Texas and Louisiana. I studied English literature with a creative writing concentration, which introduced me to classic and modern fiction. I was in close proximity to working writers like Michael Mewshaw, David Ohle, Laura Furman, Zulikar Ghose, and Don Graham. And Austin also happened to be home to many of the best Texas writers of the time, including Jan Reid, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Stephen Harrigan, Gary Cartwright, Shelby Hearon, Billy Lee Brammer, and the ghost of J. Frank Dobie, to name only a few. All of these energies combined to fan the flames of my own ambition and focused my mind and spirit on becoming a novelist. By the time I had graduated, I knew what I wanted to be, and where I wanted to be it.
Reading & Writing
After graduating in 1980, I accepted an assignment in the oil fields of the North Sea and Saudi Arabia, work that took me to remote and hostile locations throughout the world. Those experiences helped to mature me, and ground me, while they prepared me for the isolation required of a struggling novelist.
While overseas, I read voraciously for the first time in my life, consuming one book after another by British, American, and even Middle Eastern writers. As anyone familiar with Larry McMurtry's nonfiction work can attest, one must first hunger to read before they hunger to write. For too long, I had my priorities upside down, and the countless idle hours of offshore drilling and long, lonely commutes on crew boats, trains, and airplanes to Godforsaken places, many not unlike my grandparents’ farm in Arkansas, corrected this deficiency. I learned to read before I learned to write.
At the age of 25, I began to write seriously if not professionally. I returned from Saudi Arabia to Austin at 27, where I married a ballet dancer turned lawyer and continued to write in conjunction with working a wide variety of horrendous occupations.
Books
Over the next twelve years, I wrote four failed novels, racking up well over 300 publisher and literary agent rejections, which I used to paper the walls of my garage office and much of the house next door (absent owners).
I finally published my fifth, Not Between Brothers, in 1996. The book was acclaimed as "simply the best historical novel published about Texas in over a decade" by The Review of Texas Books, was a finalist for the Spur Award for Best Novel of the West, and won the Writers’ League of Texas/Barnes & Noble Violet Crown Award. It was a nice beginning after two decades of struggle, but my struggles were far from over.
My second novel, The Empty Quarter (1998), was a contemporary novel inspired by my extraordinary experiences in gas exploration in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Although I can’t say The Empty Quarter was a commercial or critical success, I can definitely state that it traveled around the world with its core readership. It was featured on Arab Gateway, a website dedicated to the culture of the Middle East, and selected as recommended reading by Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
In 2000, my short story “Opening Day” won the Spur Award for Best Short Fiction. I followed that up with the historical novel Oblivion's Altar (2002), based on the life of the visionary Cherokee chieftain Kah-nung-da-tla-geh, known as Major Ridge, who fell among his people for his involvement in the Trail of Tears. The novel won the 2003 Spur Award for Best Original Paperback Novel, and was a finalist for the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award, which says something about any Texas writer — they really hate our football teams up there.
Then I teamed up with legendary Texas Ranger H. Joaquin Jackson to write his memoir. One Ranger (2005) is still one of the most successful books for the University of Texas Press, selling well over 100,000 copies. The book was a finalist for the Spur Award for Best Biography and paved the way for a successful sequel penned by my friend, James Haley.
It was a great time for all of us. Mark Cuban’s 2929/Magnolia optioned the book for a feature film that was strangled by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We understood. One Ranger is now in its 24th printing.
In 2013, I published another contemporary novel, Where the Mountains Are Thieves, the story of a failing writer with a failing marriage in the mountainous landscape of Texas’ Big Bend. I’m currently working on a sequel to the book, set a little farther north.
I’ve also contributed to several other books and magazines, including a reminiscence of my friendship with Joaquin Jackson for Western Writers of America Roundup Magazine after Joaquin passed away in 2016 and wrote the introduction for my good friend Jan Reid’s final book, The Song Leader. I also proudly contributed to Bob “Daddy-O” Wade’s Daddy-O’s Book of Big-Ass Art (2019).
In between writing gigs and existential crises, I’ve also appeared as a speaker and writing instructor at numerous conferences and events, including the Texas Book Festival, the San Antonio Book Festival, the Writers’ League of Texas Summer Writing Retreat, Western Writers of America, SIBA and BEA conventions, and Ozark Creative Writers. I also served as writer-in-residence at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, from 2004 to 2008.
Screenwriting
Long interested in film, I finally tried my hand at screenwriting by adapting The Empty Quarter with actor/producer Todd Allen and screenwriter Bonnie Orr. Bonnie and I later co-wrote the script adapted from Oblivion's Altar.
Emmy-award-winning screenwriter-turned-novelist Alan Brennert adapted Not Between Brothers for NBC, and I modestly consulted with him. (An Emmy-Award-winning screenwriter himself, Alan has embarked on a successful career as a historical novelist.) Not Between Brothers was in development with NBC Studios/Kevin Costner’s Tig Productions for a four-hour miniseries.
Credited as a “co-producer” of the ten-hour History Channel miniseries Texas Rising (2015), I wrote approximately 90% of the 14-hour second season, which remains in development. The show won the Wrangler Award for Best Limited Series from the Western Heritage Association and Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. I also appeared as an on-screen commentator in History’s Avenging the Alamo: The Road to Texas Rising, the one-hour companion documentary film to the limited series.
Since then, I have collaborated with several independent production companies on troubled scripts. Along my journey to fix my own projects, I’ve learned to fix other people’s problems. I see things. Not dead people.
My other credits include working as a full producer on Gray House, a six-hour limited series originally written by John Sayles (still in development) and writing or co-writing a variety of feature-length films. I helped create the concept for a biopic for the Lifetime Channel based on the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, which also remains in development. I have also worked on other projects with Magnolia Pictures/2929, History, Lifetime/A&E and the Discovery Channel.
During the pandemic, I worked with Austin film director Ty Roberts on an international crime drama, The Falcon Thief. I’m very proud of our rich concept for what was basically a magazine article. Ty’s now off shooting his own script, a western, down in Argentina. He’s kind of wild.