Kaitlin Prest Is Done. Done Placating Systems. Done People-Pleasing

A look back at The Heart, and a a look forward at what Great Love |The Gaza Monologues Revisited is for Prest and her art/audio company Mermaid Palace

For more than fourteen years, Kaitlin Prest, along with a morphing collection of collaborators and “besties” has been pushing audio boundaries with The Heart, a Radiotopia title with an off-and-on affiliation with the CBC, alongside the company she founded in 2019, Mermaid Palace.  

By 2017, The Heart had amassed seven million listens; and according to a 2019 profile of Prest in The New Yorker, the show regularly had hundreds of thousands of devoted listeners. These are big numbers for audio, especially in the early days before 2020. This led Nick Quah to conclude in Hot Pod: “If this was the kind of newsletter that peddled in predictions, I would have placed a bet on the idea that 2019 could well be The Year of Kaitlin Prest.” But Quah recanted. In fact, 2019 was a ‘quiet’ year.

In the afterglow of her breakout success with The Heart’s 2017 mini-series No—a searing four-part dive into the murky waters of consent—everything shifted at lightning speed. The series garnered rave reviews. It was re-aired by Radiolab, and set off a cascade of accolades for subsequent work: Peabody nomination, Third Coast Award, Prix Italia, boom, boom, boom. Next, CBC came calling, handing her the reins to a genre-bending project, The Shadows, their first audio fiction project in decades.

When it all seemed to be at its apex in 2018, Prest put The Heart on hiatus

Then she decamped to Los Angeles in 2019 where she founded Mermaid Palace, a radical audio collective that folded The Heart into its ranks and spun out new sonic worlds. Funded by a secretive cabal of donors (with the inevitable 2019 whiff of “TV adaptation” shimmering on the Tinseltown horizon), Mermaid Palace became the locus of an artist-driven collective, reshaping the audio landscape one boundary-pushing project at a time. During this time, she “lent” The Heart to two other creators, and made Asking For It, and Appearances, both published in 2020 with the CBC.

Did Prest think she was “quiet” in 2019? I did not ask her this question directly, but here’s my educated guess at her response. First, I would receive a non-brief response, perhaps via voice memo, where the question was eventually answered (circa minute 11), but obliquely, and after many tangents, which I will later piece together to answer the short question I had asked. This was how we communicated for this article.

Second, and I’d bet 10 cents that she would say this: she wasn’t quiet. She was head-down working, trying to figure out how to confront capitalism in a world where she lives and works as an artist. She would likely add that she was busy; busy creating art and audio in equal measures…material that was not trying to ‘please’ the masses. 

Quiet should not be confused with quietly busy. After all, she had found the holy grail of art: a patron.  

And then, Covid, when it actually got real quiet. A few difficult years later, Prest was back, with a new collaborator—her sister Natalie—and a new series called “Sisters.” This was brutally open and honest, opening up the door to her past, her mental health, and her new diagnosis. The series was partly about the future, how she had grown up in a new way, and about how to continue to make radio after a full-scale breakdown, as I wrote last year. 

Prest makes artistic, soulful, sexy, boundary-pushing audio

The Heart’s website loosely defines this as  “a force of queer feminist audio art-making in the podcast industry.” And while I agree with this statement for the preceding decade,  if you listen to their most recent season: Great Love | The Gaza Monologues Revisted, you will hear something quite apart from that vision. Not against that vision; more like a full-arm extension of that concept.

[Kaitlin Prest]: I didn't make [this season] nuanced. I didn't try to speak to everyone. I'm choosing one side, actually, this time. Publicly. As a feminist creator, who has slash had a podcast, a name, some cultural capital, some reach…the complicated conversations that I have on a one-on-one basis with my friends, my Jewish friends who are feeling complicated about what's happening…I'm there for those things. They're not not legitimate. They're 100 percent legitimate. 

It's just that this time, I'm not going back and forth between those legitimate feelings that people are having and the legitimate feelings that the people who are being massacred are having.

The Gaza Monologues were created by Ashtar Theatre

A Palestinian Theatre based in Ramallah, in 2010, when they worked with a group of youth to write their experience of war in the form of monologues. There are 31 in total and they offer a snapshot of their lives. Some are heavy, and some talk about those small random things teenagers remember.

Since 2010, these monologues have been presented in more than 40 countries and translated into more than 18 languages. In response to October 7, 2023, Ashtar Theatre made a global call to perform and share the Gaza Monologues, as an act of solidarity and awareness. Their website provides the raw material—the monologues transcribed and translated. Many different groups have taken up this call: from community groups to schools, to religious institutions and activist organizations. 

The Heart also headed their call. But it prepared itself to create a different approach to the monologues. Each episode is wildly different, but all share a decidedly “Heart-like” take on how to share the actual monologues. This decision was partly practical, partly artistic, and partly financial, as reasons go.

On the practical side, the actual monologues are very short (each generally a few minutes in length). To complete the financial and artistic requirements of a full Heart season, full-length episodes would be required. This was not a concern; Prest created an emotional world around each monologue so that you see them differently, and feel them each in a new way. This is her wheelhouse.

The episodes are loosely stitched together with some themes: Prest’s unbounded love for all of the participants and collaborators; a direct connection to the people who deliver the monologues, and an indirect connection to the person who wrote the original piece; the experience of trauma; the inaction of people and government. 

Many connections and friendships are formed, but by the end of the series, you can feel and hear a singular connection to one family, the Jaber siblings, all young adults from Gaza who narrowly escaped to another country. In some ways, this series chronicles their trajectories from contributors to collaborators, their lives increasingly entwined with Prest’s. 

No two episodes are alike. If you’re listening in search of details and specifics about what’s going on in Gaza, in terms of dates, numbers, statistics, and hard facts, this is not the series to reach for. Setting aside the episode If The Sea Could Talk, which offers specific details about how one bank funds the purchase of weapons, this series does not shine on details and cohesion…the edges and the details are more vague and artistic. 

The present moment is not a familiar place for Prest. While she identifies as a documentarian, she further qualifies she’s a documentarian of the inner landscape. The Heart stories are about the psyche, the soul, and how these relate to intimacy and relationships.

She is not a reporter, or a journalist, which is why you might feel moments of cringe when she opens the discussion with Ali Dajani, who is featured in the first episode “Monologue #1” when she asks him, with trademark honesty, “What happened in 1948? Not as a historian…like based off what you were told as a kid?” 

In the latest episode, she admits she’s out of her depth in this series…which you can hear. It’s classic Prest-Transparency about how hard she has worked to make up this distance with her passion and connection.

Where you might expect a clear-spoken journalist to narrate the facts of the topic this series covers, Prest takes a different approach. She enters this difficult conversation with her classic open-arms approach, a gushing love, and a sense of urgency to help, to do more. She also has a new spin…she urges the listeners to do more. And to make sure you feel connected to these stories and these people, she puts you in the room with her sound design.

Yes, some scenes have up-turned tones of reflection, a bit of giggling, and some vocal fry. But what Prest has done is something that others haven’t. Or couldn’t. She has made friends with Gazans. This series is designed for you to get to know them too, on a deep and connecting level, so that you can feel and hear what it’s been like to live through this last year, told by people who were so close to it they could record gunfire on their cell phones.

Instead of looking for hard facts, I would recommend listening in a way that opens your mind (and heart) to new voices and the challenging details that emerge from this series. Be ready to feel some shame for your own response to what you’re doing (or not doing) in response to Gaza (and now Lebanon) right now. 

Series overview

Sometimes the episode centers around the person, as with Ali Dejani in the first episode a Palestinian man who lives in the diaspora. Or the artist and founder of Beirut Design Week Doreen Toutikian who patiently explains to Prest all the things she’s lost in war. Or by creating an activist message around them (as with Monologue #19, If The Sea Could Talk, when Aliya Pabani), also a collaborator and consultant on this series, delivered the monologue to a very patient bank employee.

As I listened to the episodes in order, I could hear the series evolve in real time. When I heard a specific date mentioned in the series, within the same week I was listening, I realized that something was very different about this production. Although many productions produce and publish within the same week, that is not the traditional speed of The Heart. “Basically I’m trying to do in six months what I usually do in three years,” Prest shared with me when I asked for clarity.

More generally, what I heard within the growth trajectory of the series was Prest building a scaffold around The Jaber siblings—to help support them to settle in a new country, to see if they could file a refugee claim for Canada, to research a school that would accept them, a GoFundMe to help them pay for tuition. I was curious about this concept, of leveraging a podcast as a means to help raise money and support someone, so I checked in with Prest about how this had gone. 

Prest reported that the results are mixed. Yes, some money had been raised (some through the podcast appeal, most through direct appeal). But the cautionary tale here was that while it was something, it wasn’t enough to change someone’s life. I wondered if this wasn’t always the case with fundraising.

This move away from classic audio storytelling toward something more action-oriented is something that I’ve begun to see bubble up in the industry

Yowei Shaw is doing it with Proxy, where she’s directly trying to help people, not just create beautiful stories. Brian Reed has just launched a new series, Question Everything, which pulls the entire journalism industry into question. Jess Shane took a good hard look at documentary ethics with her series Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative.  

The net effect of bringing the appeal inside the podcast series is that it changes the finish line. It goes from being intimate, connecting, beautiful storytelling…to doing all that, but then also adds impact to the completion goal.

Prest doesn’t just ask you to support them—she does it first. She hired them to work on the series; Ahmad Jabber learned how to cut audio for this series and worked in an Associate Producer capacity while Tarneem Jabber helped with the website and social media. 

Like the entire body of work that The Heart has created, these stories are also built on—and with—the friendships of the people featured in the stories. Prest has created a new community, this one connected to Gaza, around her. Prest often puts you in the same room, as though you’re eavesdropping on a conversation you aren’t supposed to hear. It forces you to confront a person, or an idea, or a situation…or an atrocity…on an intimate level. And if you feel slightly uncomfortable for a moment, you know it’s doing its job.  

Your reaction to this feeling of audio intimacy—that experience of being pulled down by the scruff of your neck to look closely at something that might be uncomfortable to you—is what separates The Heart diehard fans from others. You don’t seek out the work of Kaitlin Prest to be placated and adored. You certainly feel that adoration for those whom she creates the audio with…but she does not pander to the listener.

With this series, she takes it to a new level

In the middle of an answer to another question, Prest takes a deep breath and says: 

[Katilin Prest]: “You know...I just, I'm done. I'm done. I'm done placating. I'm done flip-flopping. I'm stronger than I've ever been, but at the same time, I'm still me. I'm still questioning.

I still have an identity disturbance. I do wake up every day with a new definition of who I am, and what my art is for. I do wake up every day with a different explanation for why I've decided to pivot this way, at this juncture.

There's 100 answers, and they're all true.”  

Here’s what I see: Prest is not satisfied with the tourist approach any longer. She has embraced this global issue and thrown her whole self at it. And now she would like you to ante up more support as well. She is clear that her goal is to make you take all of these emotions and turn them into action. Many times throughout the series she suggests ways listeners can donate money, from the Jaber siblings GoFundMe, to buying art from the artists and musicians featured in the series.

She’s prescriptive about her request:

“And you, dear listener, are going to help us make it real. To quiet your conscience. You can quiet your conscience here and now.

And then you know you're good with God and you don't have to do a single social media post. Okay? But what I want and what I'm asking, I want people to just donate a thousand bucks, okay?

I want a thousand. I want each person, I want you to donate a thousand. Please just think about it.

Because if we get a thousand from each person, we don't have to watch it trickling in ten dollars by ten dollars by twenty by fifty by hundred. Please, please help me make just one thing easy for these people.

Please. Please. Please.

Can you please help?

Fuck.

You know, just think about it. It's five fancy dinners.

Okay?

So just give up five fancy dinners.

Or, you know, it's one fancy, it's one super fancy dinner that you pay for your friend at. I spent five hundred dollars on one dinner. That's right.

“So that means I know that there's people out, I know that there's some of you who do that sometimes. And, you know, what if you just don't do it? It's two nights in a fancy hotel.

It's a staycation, if you ever do that.”

It’s now the end of 2024 

We find ourselves on the other side of the pandemic, inside a troubling, expanding war, a changing world order of new (and old) oppressors. The Heart is no longer interested to see if we can hear the word vagina without giggling and squirming.

Prest is pissed off about what’s going on in Gaza, and the Middle East more broadly. She’s not afraid to use the term genocide throughout the series to talk about the last year, which itself is a political statement of action. She’s also pissed off that “none of her friends in Toronto give a fuck” about what’s happening. Ergo, this series is her effort, her great will, to make change and make things happen. 

She begins with herself. Through this series, she will try to do something. This series makes it clear that it’s her time to make a statement about where she stands and see if her audio art can help to effect change. She set out to make something that reflects what is going on in the world, at the moment that it is happening, from an open and soulful perspective.

She also has an assignment for us: we should care more; we should listen more; we should give more. And quite likely, we should cry more, which she admits she has been doing every day of this production.

After fourteen years of artistic work that dives into the world of human connection, made ‘by and with my closest friends,’ an approach I assume is also her answer for how to make consensual media, The Heart has branched out. It follows that in order to make consensual media with, by and about Gaza, to raise awareness, create solidarity, and possibly even find a genuine way to help the people featured in her series, she would need to fold Gazans into her world.

Prest has adapted her sometimes self-indulgent audio storytelling into something more about collective action and change. Can audio affect positive change and make a material difference in someone else’s life? In a way this has happened to her already—the anonymous donor paid her to establish and run an artist collective based on queer feminist narratives.

With Great Love | Gaza Monologues Revisited, she can play this forward, and appeal to her large and diverse audience to donate. Perhaps they (we, the audience) can help change the outcome of a family, the three Jaber siblings, while at the same time, fulfilling the wider goal of raising action and awareness.

Stripped down to the bones, this season feels the same as other Heart work: the end goal is an emotional reaction to the work. But this time the landscape is much wider. This time it demands a heart-level connection to the wider world and our ability to fully believe, and fully witness, these stories. Consider it a new definition of intimacy. 

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