Author Doug Wilhelm: Prize-Winning Success

Article in The Times Argus

Author Doug Wilhelm: Prize-winning success after 75 rejections

By Janelle Faignant Arts Correspondent | May 30, 2020

This past month, a Vermont author won not one but four book awards. It’s rare to win an award for a published book let alone three in a single day and a total of four in two weeks. But that’s what happened to Weybridge author Doug Wilhelm, a former resident of Montpelier and Rutland Town.

But what makes his story special is that the recognition comes after nearly 40 years and 75 rejections.

“There’s a long story behind this book,” Wilhelm said by phone recently. “In one form or another I worked on it for 38 years.”

He’s written well over a dozen novels throughout his career, including several for the popular “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, and “The Revealers,” perhaps his best-known novel, which has been used in reading-and-discussion groups in more than 1,000 middle schools across the country, including more than 90 in Vermont.

But this year the light shone on “Street of Storytellers” and “China in Another Time,” two books published last fall, both with storied journeys.

“Street of Storytellers” won the 2020 gold medal for young adult fiction from the Independent Press Awards. The same competition’s gold medal for autobiography went to “China in Another Time,” a memoir that Wilhelm edited and compiled.

Then “Street of Storytellers” won a silver medal for teen fiction from the Benjamin Franklin Awards, and soon after, second place for fiction by the IndieReader Discovery Awards. The awards came after a 38-year span during which Wilhelm spent working on the book.

Set in Peshawar, Pakistan, during Christmas 1984, it centers on a teenage boy who gets caught up in the extremism that’s beginning to develop in the city — the birthplace of al Qaeda. But the story originally began as a nonfiction account of Wilhelm’s two-year stay in Asia.

“When I was in my late 20s I left my newspaper job in New Jersey, where I grew up, and I traveled to this part of the world,” he said by phone. “This was the early ’80s. I wanted to write a nonfiction book about exploring the Muslim world and trying to understand the people.”

The original book had a different title, and centered on his own experiences. He saved notebooks and clippings and wrote the book he set out to write, but that version didn’t work. So he imagined a group of teenagers in that place and time, and reworked the story into a novel.

“I thought if I could put an American kid in this place and time, and have him get caught up in it, you could write a thriller that would really be about something,” Wilhelm said.

But nobody would publish it. It was rejected 75 times. …

Read the full article here.