On Filbert Conroy

From one of our lower-upstate New York outposts, a copy of On Lives disappeared. While doing our bi-monthly check-up of bookstores currently distributing On Lives, we found that someone had walked into Inquiring Minds Bookstore in New Paltz, NY and walked out with a copy of the Subway Supplement. Obviously, we weren’t sure who this person was but we wanted to find out.

Over the months since the Supplement’s release, we’ve received emails from a number of people who’ve picked up the booklet. It’s been great to hear back from readers who are not our friends or relatives, who enjoy and appreciate our work as strangers and artists. One such person, who happened to be passing through New Paltz, NY for some unknown reason, is a man named Filbert Conroy.

Mr. Conroy wrote to On Lives Press thanking us “gentlemen for the wonderfully written and illustrated little pamphlet,” glad that “thinking people were still out there who did not get caught up in the garish sentiments of the day.” Judging from what and the way Mr. Conroy had written us, Dan and I thought perhaps this man was a writer himself.

It turns out that Mr. Conroy has “never considered himself much of a writer, finding (he was) much too lazy for everyday practice.” Mr. Conroy did, however, mention a short manuscript of “not quite poetry and not quite fiction,” that he had been toying with for some time now, and that our “little book” had inspired him to pick up his own again.

So naturally, we offered to help him complete it.

On Lives Press is proud to announce its second release, Filbert Conroy’s Blink and the World Goes Blank. In his first ever collection of microfiction, Filbert Conroy looks at the human condition from an almost neutral standpoint, reporting on it as an arbiter rather than participant. Some of the freshest metaphors and descriptions are found within its pages, the kind of writing that makes you sit up a little straighter and laugh out loud at its brilliance. You’ll want to take a look around whatever place you find yourself reading it in and find the nearest person to share its message with. There’s a lot we can learn about life and our relationship to it from Mr. Conroy. I know I already have.

-Mike Parish, Writer/Editor of On Lives
(Photo credit: Moya Coote)