Thomas Lloyd Qualls, 42, is a local attorney, father, poet and
novelist. As the winner of the Reno News & Review’s best
local novelist in our annual readers’ poll, it seemed incumbent
upon us to read his debut novel, Waking up at Rembrandt’s.
More information on Qualls and his work can be found at www.writingandbeing.com.
Why was the restaurant called Café
Rembrandt? Was that actually mentioned in the book?
It probably wasn’t. It was probably mentioned in an earlier
version. I’d written this novel one time before, and it was at
least twice as long and had more characters and a different voice, and
I may have explained it then. But I kind of decided that in a lot of
things, less is more. Rembrandt was a master of chiaroscuro, the
balance of light and dark, so it plays off that a little bit—the
balance of shadow and light or yin and yang or whatever universal thing
you could think of.
Now I understand why you used Rembrandt as
the sustained metaphor. Did you have something particular you were
going for with Rembrandt, or did you assume people would understand
that?
I liked the backdrop of it. I like how confused “genius”
is for us. Like art—painters, writers, artists often talk about
being in that flow where they can’t really take full
responsibility for what comes out … sort of like spirit moving
through them or genius, or whatever you want to call it, it’s
inspired. Athletes, same way, that being-in-the-zone-type deal where
you’re able to do things that are kind of perceived as
superhuman. But often those same people are terrible at life. So
Rembrandt was this amazingly gifted artist. A lot of people see him as
the master of masters, but his life was a wreck. His money was
terrible, and he ended up completely destitute. There’s all kinds
of nice metaphors for that balance, or imbalance. We also have a
tendency to chew up genius or bright lights around us and then throw
them away when we’re done. He makes a nice metaphor for that. So
I played on that, and I played on that with the arts and the words and
the love poems. There’s a lot of the mystery of life in there and
how we deal with it, and it’s often sort of off to the corner of
our eyes. The idea that the broker he got and the more society cast him
out, the better his art got has always been interesting to me. That was
the backdrop. That’s what I played with.
So much of this is autobiographical. I
mean, you’re all those characters, right?
In some ways, yeah. I think fiction can’t help but to be
autobiographical to some extent.
What’s the next book about?
The next book is called Painted Oxen. On one hand, it’s
simpler in that there are only two storylines that are woven. One is a
backpacker in modern-day India, and one is an ancient Tibetan searching
for a holy land. The kind of vehicle that I play with is the dream
world versus the real world and kind of which one is which. I hope that
the reader will ask themselves which one is which—is one of these
characters the dream life of the other, and which is which, really?
… I’m probably halfway done. I’m not as far along as
I’d hoped because I had a child and that took up a big chunk of
the year.