This Is Not a Profile About Kaitlin Prest.
Radio has to grow. Mermaid Palace is here to grow it.
Kaitlin Prest would not call this a conversation. She’s hyper-aware of the speed and length at which she talks, and uses the phrase “I don’t know” as a shorthand apology after a long paragraph of her thoughts. “I answer every question for twenty minutes, so choose your next one wisely,” she jokes to me on the quiet Friday night before the digital launch of her new enterprise. She’s almost exactly like I remember her from when I talked to her about The Shadows, but her voice is brighter and her clarity of words sharper, possibly a result from the month-long vacation or from the constant vibration of excitement for the birth of Mermaid Palace.
Kaitlin Prest’s Mermaid Palace is an audio company: a group of artists who perform sound art together as spectacle and experience, in whatever form that needs to take. It’s about more than creating one show; they’re going to be involved in multiple podcasts, live performances, residencies, and even film and TV. In 2013, just before Kaitlin’s right-in-your-face radio show Audio Smut transformed into the searingly intimate podcast The Heart, Kaitlin wrote out the mission and vision of “Radioland”, an organization rooted in feminist queer communities that pushes boundaries of narrative nonfiction. Kaitlin envisioned a collaborative, supportive community of working sound artists. Not the work of one person, but of many creating art together.
Therefore, this is not a profile about Kaitlin Prest. This is a profile about Mermaid Palace, through the eyes of Kaitlin Prest.
MERMAID PLACE: ROOM FOR AN IDEA
Before it was an idea, Mermaid Palace was a place. Mermaid Palace was Kaitlin’s bedroom in the four-story house she shared with her best friend and long-time collaborator Sharon Mashihi (among others; it is New York after all). It was the top floor bedroom with the closet that became where they recorded Audio Smut and The Heart; in fact, religious listeners of The Heart will likely recognize it as “the four-story hippie house” full of artists and queers. Kaitlin describes the house as being the kind of place where “there’s no cleaning of the grime in the corners.” Kaitlin is a storyteller down to her bones; when I ask her to talk about the origins of Mermaid Palace, she sets the scene with a sharp longing.
“I remember walking into the house for the first time and it was just the first time I ever felt at home in New York ever, because it felt like Montreal.” She leads me on an imaginative tour of the kitchen that sits in the basement, a fire stove that has stained the floor, and bicycles hanging off the ceiling, but it’s when she gets to the top floor bedroom that she sublet in 2012 that she suddenly picks up speed. The person she sublet from left behind a pirate-ship boat hanging from the wall, one with so many sails made out of paper and on each sail there were endless tallies.
“There was something about those sails with tallies that made it seem like there was such a magical story. Who was counting what on that boat? When he took it, I was devastated, but I think it set the tone for the room.” Kaitlin painted the room white, and then on a whim designed blue-black waves across the baseboard— waves that make up the logo shape of Mermaid Palace today.
Mermaid Palace the room evolved into a bigger concept within the confines of the walk-in closet, one that touched everything Kaitlin, Sharon, and the other artists orbiting The Heart worked on, one that strained to break free of being pigeonholed as one podcast or another. “It wasn’t just about making a radio show,” she emphasizes. “It was about a creative community. It was about a company who had a certain voice and vision while creating a structure that allowed us to break those standards that we set for ourselves.”
On the papers from 2013 where she scribbled out the reinvention of Audio Smut, she outlined two options. The first option, a singular voice with a top-down hierarchy and a director that seeks credibility in the world of public radio. The second, a collective with a horizontal power structure and where everyone’s voice has equal value, one accountable to the queer feminist community and who makes work for them and no one else.
“We don’t have to call this ‘women’s art’. We don’t have to call it ‘queer art’. We can just call it art.”
Mermaid Palace is about trying to have both of these structures and ideals at the same time, Kaitlin goes on to explain. “This is a hierarchical company. Like, I am the director, but at the same time, the goal of the company is to [greenlight] shows where other people can be the top of their own hierarchy.” The entire ethos of the company is rooted in the mermaid’s duality: embodying two things at once while they are seemingly in opposition to each other. “You can both make work from your own point of view and be the boss of your own thing, have autonomy and power and control over your own thing, while also taking turns being on the behind-the-scenes side, holding someone else up and letting them be the boss and letting them have the autonomy the creative control.”
I ask Kaitlin if she was closing her eyes and letting go, like she had to do when facing down the work of The Shadows. But Kaitlin says she’s not afraid. She believes in the people who have joined her on this journey in erecting Mermaid Palace.
SHARON MASHIHI
Sharon Mashihi has been, in no particular order, a story consultant, a screenwriter, an editor, a podcast writer, a performer, a filmmaker, and a best friend. The Mermaid Palace crew calls her the “director of people and culture”, because Sharon doesn’t just know about people, but she takes care with the experience they have. “She always makes sure the room smells good. She always makes sure people are fed. She’s a good host.” Sharon and Kaitlin’s hístory of collaborative art goes way back, including their 2012 production of Radio Cabaret, a performance series where they brought the tradition of public radio and audio documentaries to life on a stage at Union Docs in Brooklyn.
Together, they started SHA/KA, an equitable trade of time and energy between the two of them to help each other complete their artistic projects. While Kaitlin was trying to get the script for The Heart episode “Movies in Your Head” written, Sharon was in misery over a feature film she had yet to make progress on. “We’ll sit here two hours,” Kaitlin told her. “I’ll sit with you while you sync the audio to your images and then you spend two hours helping me with my script.” And when Sharon came upstairs to watch Kaitlin write something she had never done before, all Sharon said was: “Great job. Oh, that’s a great line. Oh, wow. Good writing.” Sharon and Kaitlin gave each other the support of cheerleading without judgment.
Sharon is crafting the podcast Appearances, which will be released in partnership with Radiotopia in May 2020. It’s a fictional drama about an Iranian-American family who hide their true selves from each other, based on the audio documentary Sharon created for KCRW’s Unfictional, “Man Choubam (I Am Good)”. In it, Sharon describes the arc of her relationship with her mother, and presents the conversation they have about clothes, self-representation, marriage, and emotions on a Persian self-help cruise.
PHOEBE UNTER/NICOLE KELLY
Phoebe Unter and Nicole Kelly (or PU/NK) wrote to The Heart three or so years ago, having made their own podcast and wanting to learn more about the craft of podcasting from the people at The Heart. Kaitlin waxes poetic for several minutes about Bitchface, about the first time she listened and the rising tide of strong emotions it pulled out of her. “Once we made this journey to becoming more mainstream, more palatable,” Kaitlin says to me fiercely, “we left behind a certain sound, you know? And a certain commitment to social justice and to hardcore queer politics.” Here, “us” refers to the more nebulous concept of “us, all creators of audio and public radio”, and particularly those who have not pushed back against the normalization of sound.
Bitchface critiques power through jokes, through adventure, and through fiery audio. They talk about women and feminism, the effects of patriarchy, and the intersections with performativity, racism, and living in the world. “It was like all the things that I set out to do in media they were doing: in your face, just the most raw, radical, theory-based,” and Kaitlin’s voice hitches in excitement. “It was speaking directly to a particular type of person who believes in this kind of radical politics. And I had been waiting [for that].” Kaitlin’s exhale travels through the phone line and in that breath, I have to agree with her.
Before getting on the call, I had queued up the episode of Bitchface they had aired on The Heart, “A Woman On the Road Is Alone.” It features Nicole Kelly narrating their hitchhiking adventure, undertaken to counter the lack of female road narratives, told from a third-person perspective intercut with interviews they had with their various drivers. It is, without a doubt, raw and radical and grounded both in theory and in experience.
PU/NK are going to be releasing a still-secret project in January 2020, also in partnership with Radiotopia.
DREW DENNY
Drew Denny is the reason Kaitlin moved to LA. She does, according to Kaitlin, everything: performance art, film, music; she even has her own band. But her baby, her dream, is film. She made a documentary titled Queer Habits about The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a charity and protest organization that utilizes drag and religious imagery to call attention to issues of sexual intolerance and hate. The doc, Kaitlin tells me with immense pride for her friend, is getting adapted for TV by Marta Kaufman’s (Friends) company OK Goodnight for TNT. With a similar tone of pride as well as the sense of drama she’s known for, Kaitlin also tells me about the time that Drew texted her to say, “I just spent the whole day recording the sound of throwing a bag of dildos on the floor. Dream job!”
Kaitlin moved to LA to help Drew with television writing and producing. But then Drew tells Kaitlin about an idea she had that she was considering making into a book. “And I was like, oh my God, no, please make it into a podcast! Let’s do it together, you know?” (Kaitlin’s exuberance matches my own: yes, make it into a podcast! If only I could convince more people to turn their ideas into audio). “We were calling it a queer contemporary take on the Goldilocks tale, but it’s really a love story about a musician, about friendship, and it’s about intimate partner violence and domestic abuse.”
Asking For It releases in partnership with CBC Podcasts in February 2020. It’s a fiction show that takes the techniques and format that was created in The Shadows and applies them; for Kaitlin The Shadows was a formal experiment in how to create fiction that sounds true to life, and now she can see the results of it used elsewhere in stories to create a cohesive and consistent sound. An original soundtrack to Asking For It with music by Drew’s band, Hips, with producer Christina Gaillard, will also be released.
POWER, CAPITALISM, AND ART
“The space that The Heart filled was really important for a long time because there was no other place in radio for those types of stories to get made,” Kaitlin reminisces. Her sentences are broken up, like her thoughts tumble faster than words can form in her mouth, and she checks herself constantly. And then sometimes, she doesn’t. “I’m talking about politics a lot, but we’re at a point now where we’re not really publicly stating that this is a radical company with radical politics. We’re just saying: this is a fucking art company and we’re making work about stuff that is interesting to us, and we don’t have to position it like that anymore.”
As she winds up to her point, her words go faster and faster like she’s the bowling ball rolling faster down the lane. “We don’t have to call this ‘women’s art’. We don’t have to call it ‘queer art’. We can just call it art.”
Bam. Strike.
The last question I ask Kaitlin is, “What do you want people to think of when they think of Mermaid Palace?”
There’s a long silence. Kaitlin breaks it occasionally with hums, or nervous laughter. Maybe it’s an unfair question; it sounds like I’m asking Kaitlin to distill everything we’ve talked about for an hour and a half into a soundbite. Nothing about Mermaid Palace can be condensed into a single sentence.
Mermaid Palace is an art company, an audio company, and an experience in dualities and contrast. Long ago, when Kaitlin was making Audio Smut and scandalizing the airwaves, all she could promise was for them to make work together and the reward was making art. With The Heart, the reward became cultural capital and a little bit of money, but it was only with The Shadows that they were paid industry rates under the compromise of it being Kaitlin’s story, in Kaitlin’s voice, and all the expectations that come with that.
“Now I have just proven quantity enough that people, that networks, will say yes and they trust that I’m going to deliver. I can share that power with the people in my community.” And then, nervously, “Does that make sense?”
It does. Every design choice for the Mermaid Palace is about helping creators and artists grow, learn, and experiment. They’re planning two residencies: a treatment residency, to help artists develop the business side of their show idea, and an experimental residency, to spend a month truly experimenting with how to represent the truth without being beholden to the need to make the result sellable. Kaitlin dreams for every person who ever worked on The Heart to have their own show.
And becoming an editor and producer and doula for other people’s voices doesn’t mean Kaitlin has left behind her own art either. Kaitlin has plans for a show entitled Mermaid Palace that’s about everything we talked about: about dualities, about power structure, about the moment that the punk band goes pro and loses its ideals set within radical feminism and queer politics. She wants to explore the question: “Is it anti-feminist to be hierarchical?”.
The silence after my question continues. I lean into it, waiting, but Kaitlin starts thinking out loud, as if trying to lead her own self through a labyrinth. She discusses how every great medium of art has a feminist school, and she wants to know: where is it in radio? “I’ve always believed in radio as an art form and it’s never really been able to hold itself to that standard because it’s been so homogeneous in style.” This is something she’s uttered multiple times throughout the night: Radio has to grow. The implication is that Mermaid Palace is here to encourage that growth.
Finally, Kaitlin admits to me that she second-guessed herself in answering my question. “The first thing I thought of that made me think I hadn’t done my work properly is I want it to feel inviting.”
She takes a breath.
“I want people to think of [Mermaid Palace] and feel like: ‘Anything that comes out of this company or this group of people is going to romance me. It’s going to let me sink into an alternate universe and it’s also going to feel warm, and it’s also going to feel like it’s for me, no matter who I am.’ You know,” she starts to laugh; Kaitlin’s laugh is an anticipatory trill on top of her words. “those things. That’s it.”
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