“I moved [to Reno] in ‘95 and you know, the food wasn't as good then but the eclecticness of the people and the culture was great,” Thomas Lloyd Qualls, a local Reno author, said in our interview, “I'd love that it was a small town and it was close to a lot of cool stuff. In a few hours, I could be in wine country or San Francisco or in less than an hour, I could be in Tahoe. So I thought ‘This is perfect. I'll just stay a while.’ And here I am 25 years later.”
After leaving law school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Qualls followed a few friends out to Reno and searched for freelance jobs to bulk up his portfolio. He landed a job writing up appeals and doing research for a few lawyers, “but the writing was still going on in the background the whole time.” Once his first book Waking Up at Rembrandt’s came out in 2009, it gained a lot of attention as the ‘Best Novel’ three years in a row in the Reno News and Review’s ‘Best Of’ section.
The attention was so massive that “Oliver X (with RenoTahoe2Nite), who was one of the first people to review Waking Up at Rembrandt's, invited me to submit a piece whenever I wanted. So I started doing that. And then he gave me a regular column and then the column went from 500 words to 1000 words and they moved me up to the front of the magazine and we just did that for I think like between six and seven years. I started in January of 2012. And then I stopped doing it so that I could focus on getting Painted Oxen out the door.”
While working on that novel, Qualls conducted interviews in Reno based on his own perceptions of the Tarot. He used these interviews as a “literary vehicle” and even rewrote his own descriptions of the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot. He then “took those descriptions which are part of the thread that runs through the novel. And I would assign a character to those so, we would pick four people to interview and assign each of them a card. And then I asked them questions that were all pulled out of those descriptions that I had written to see how much their personality or their life story matched that card and they were always spot on for some reason.” Interviews he recorded included some with local artists and the mayor.
Qualls remarked that in Reno, “there's a higher mindedness and a really cool artistic spirit here. I think it's great that we're the gateway for Burning Man because the town became an infusion of all of that creative energy and a lot of that art has ended up here. All of that has really contributed to life here.” He goes on to say that Reno is similar to a magnet that pulls people back. “I would watch people try to leave and then they just end up a year later back here. For whatever reason, Reno just called them back because they couldn't find that same thing, that same electricity and community in other places.”
Artists come in several different categories from painters to graphic designers to authors. The Reno community has art shows and galleries appearing all over the downtown area. “I think Reno is more art friendly,” Qualls said, “I am fortunate to have a pretty good network and community here but when COVID kept people from rolling out, there were over 80 people that showed up to Sundance for the launch of Painted Oxen.” The closeness of the community and the familiarity from the public made him feel at home since “the feedback that I got when I was writing the column for Reno/Tahoe Tonight magazine, I would just be in a restaurant. One of the servers or somebody that I didn't know would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I really love your work, or I really loved your piece this month.’”
However, an artist is not an artist without their struggles. Qualls said that “most people think writing a book and getting a book contract is like ‘Oh, that's it. I'm golden now, right?’ And 20 years ago, you could make a decent living. If you were able to get a publisher and get a book out on the shelves, it was going to sell and you were going to make at least something. Maybe that's not the only source of income you can have, but you're gonna do okay as an author, and then the internet changed everything.”
With the convenience of Amazon and online ordering, being an author is harder than it seems. “There's way more books being published and it's way harder to rise above the noise and the vast amount of authors out there are actually on bookshelves in bookstores. Sundance has an online system where you can just order your books. So they don't even have to carry it in order to sell it, they just go out and buy it from where it's available,” Qualls said.
His most recent book, Happiness is an Imaginary Line in the Sand, didn’t start out as a book at all. Qualls states that he “didn't set out to write a book when I was doing it. It just turned out that I had something like 75 essays that I had written between the magazine and there's a few other online forums that I wrote for. It was a way to make them available to a broader audience. My audience was mostly local, so I thought this would be a way to get them out to a broader world.”
Using a similar approach to Painted Oxen, Qualls planned on doing “a lot of small, intimate gatherings and two Oracle readings basically. I created an Oracle deck with one card for each of the essays and had someone pull a card and then I read the essay where we kind of talk about how that relates to their life. So it's an idea that could go in backyards and living rooms. Whoever wants to host could invite their own people.”
Unlike the title of his newest book, Qualls says that “ I don’t pose myself as someone who's enlightened or who is even happy all the time. But as someone who has slogged through the mud of life, you know, there's a lot. Up until six months ago, I was a criminal defense lawyer for a big chunk of my adult life. And so I'm used to seeing the ugliness and the muddiness of life.”
“But it's like everything,” Qualls remarks as he thought back on the difficulties he had gone through over the course of his career, “It's like podcasts. Podcasts are everywhere. How do you rise above the noise? How do you hear the signal above the noise? If you're a reader who wants to read good books or if you're a writer who wants to get your book out there? What do you do to make a difference?”