Sharon Mashihi

Sharon Mashihi an audio artist, screenwriter, and story editor, and the creator of Mermaid Palace’s Appearances, an elaboration and response to her award winning personal documentary, Man Choubam, which won the Silver Prize at Third Coast Audio Festival in 2018. Sharon has been a longtime editor at The Heart. She was also the editor of the CBC fictional series, The Shadows. Follow Mermaid Palace on Twitter here.

How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
As a fan, This American Life was my gateway drug. As a maker, when I was in my early 20s, I used to carry around a tape recorder in my bag. Initially, I wasn’t planning to make anything out of my recordings. I just liked what happened to a conversation once the recorder was on the table and everyone knew it was rolling.

How did you get involved with The Heart?
I met Kaitlin Prest in 2012 and we instantly became collaborators and friends. I used to give her feedback on episodes of Audio Smut, which was a slightly grittier precursor to The Heart. Then once she started The Heart, it seemed only natural that we'd continue working together. 

Tell us about Appearances!
Appearances is a little hard to describe. It's a show about a woman who's just like me, but isn't me. This woman's name is Melanie. Just like me, Melanie is Iranian American. And just like me, Melanie is desperate to have a kid. Also like me, she has some psychological and logistical blocks to becoming a mother. The series follows Melanie as she tries to understand her family better and make her way towards motherhood. We never really know if we’re meeting Melanie’s family as they actually are, or if we’re meeting them through Melanie’s skewed perspective of them, as voices she carries around in her head.

How much of the show is fiction, and how much of it is memoir?
The show is 6 ½ out of 10 true.

The Heart is known for pushing the boundaries for what we hear on podcasts. Will Appearances do that?
I play a lot of the characters on the show, so that’s new. And the sound design has a homemade aesthetic about it that’s not like a lot of other things out there. Personally, I don’t think about pushing boundaries as much as I do about specificity. I put my deep raw specific heart into this show. And so, it’s very “me.” I don’t know if that pushes a boundary exactly, but it does make Appearances specifically uniquely itself.

What’s more important, story or sound?
Story!!!!

What’s something listeners don’t understand about podcasts and what goes into making them?
A lot of effort goes into making podcasts, but I think listeners probably know that. What I didn’t know before I started working on Appearances was how much making a podcast could feel like painting. That it could be like coming back to a canvas again and again, one day adding blue here, the next day adding a little red.  I don’t mean to sound pretentious when I say this. Maybe when I say “paint”, we should imagine a five year old finger painting on construction paper. But before working on this show, I just never knew how iterative making audio could be.  

If I may go even further and mix some metaphors…  Making this show was like playing in a sandbox! It was like dancing in the ocean! It was like going to a contact improv jam session, standing on the sidelines trying not to get hit!  

What do you hope Appearances will do for people?
I hope it’ll hold their attention. I hope they’ll have a little spark of delight each time an episode shows up in their feed. It's my very greatest wish to make something listenable, something that’s not a chore to listen to, something that feels like a real treat.

Women in podcasting are constantly being criticized for their voices. What is your relationship with yours? How would you describe your voice?
I’ll be honest and tell you that I hate my reflection in the mirror, but I adore the sound of my own voice.

Thanks, Sharon!