Miller Aud-cast #46: Mohan Fitzgerald

Hello and welcome to Miller Aud-cast, the Missouri Review podcast where we listen to and discuss the finalists for the 2021 Miller Audio Prize. I’m Marc McKee, TMR’s managing editor. It’s good to have you back, or here for the first time, with episode 46 of the Miller Aud-cast, featuring the latest finalist for the 2021 Miller Audio Prize in Prose, Mohan Fitzgerald’s “For Frank Ponomarenko, For Feeding The Birds.” Mohan Fitzgerald is a musician and writer born in Boston and raised in Toronto. His audio storytelling work is the culmination of years of training in both creative writing and music. He studied composition and audio production at Berklee College of Music and received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University in May of 2021. His print work has been published with Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review and Southern Indiana Review. He makes music for podcasts, most recently composing the theme for an Ohio State Theatre, Film and Media Arts Department reimagining of Paul Bae’s groundbreaking fiction podcast The Big Loop. He continues to work on audio projects and is drafting a novel about a hermetic movie buff and an unscrupulous video rental mogul. Artist Notes: “For Frank Ponomarenko, For Feeding The Birds,” is Mohan’s third complete audio story. He produced the piece independently, and composed as well as performed the original theme music. The piece is based on a short story published in Canada’s EVENT magazine. Mohan wrote the story with no intention of producing an audio version, but discovered that the text was ripe for adaptation. The story deals with silences and echoes, strains on communication, auditory illusions, and the surprising power of resonance. Mohan plays with scale and size in both the sound design and music production for the piece, conveying intimacy through close microphoning techniques and distance using projected spaces, long reverb tails and echoes. But if anything, the story is about distance yielding intimacy, people from different worlds coming together because of a shared curiosity over their differences. “For Frank Ponomarenko, For Feeding The Birds” is, Mohan hopes, a kind of secular prayer, a meditation on our small moments of revelation and connection, how unexpectedly they emerge, and how long—despite their seeming insignificance—they seem to reverberate. Mohan has produced longer scale audio works, covering all aspects of production and music performance. They are available on his website mohanfitzgerald.com. Thanks for being here with us for Miller Aud-cast 46, featuring “For Frank Ponomorenko, Feeding the Birds,” from Mohan Fitzgerald. Aud-cast 47 will be here for you before you know it, so keep a watchful ear and listening eye about you. Thanks as always to the Missouri Review contest editor, Bailey Boyd, and to Patricia Miller, for her generous support for the Miller Audio Prize. BE ADVISED: Entries are now open for the second annual Perkoff Prize, the new opportunity from the Missouri Review which awards $3000 + publication in prizes to the poet, fiction writer, and essayist with the best work engaging the fields of health and medicine in provocative ways. Learn more on our website, or subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates: https://www.missourireview.com/the-missouri-review-newsletter-sign-up/. As ever, TMR is open for submissions year-round, and we remain dedicated to discovering and publishing the best contemporary writing in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Be heard. Give us the opportunity to discover you: submit your work today! In addition, we have tons of marvelous (and free!) creative content to read, listen to, and even watch on our website. Learn more at missourireview.com.