You could say she's (Prairie Fire Theme Song) (Prairie Fire Theme Song) (Prairie Fire Theme Song) (Prairie Fire Theme Song) Welcome to Prairie Fire.

I'm Sarah Edwards.

You know, some of us start our adult lives pursuing one career, and then we kind of switch halfway to pursue something else that we, like, hopefully others of us, risk security and safety to do something we're really passionate about.

Kayla Brown of champaign can really relate to that.

She has combined her love of music, healthy living and candle making into a business she calls fire doll studio.

Candle making can be done in factories.

Candle making can be done by machines.

You don't need human hands to make candles anymore.

But we don't do that here.

We really try to embrace the history of candle making, the original science behind candle making.

And the biggest thing is that we just make everything here by hand.

You candles are 5000 years old.

Candles are so old, and in the 5000 years of candle making, we're like in the Bougie luxury era of candle making, we really try to exercise a little bit of sculpture and what we do.

So we make some really neat molded candles.

But when you make a candle that is cute, looks like a waffles, nobody wants to light that candle.

I I've always loved candles, but I have asthma, so I've always really struggled with with commercial candles.

Most commercial candles, even if you're buying a soy candle, they only have to be 50% soy to be advertised as a soy candle, so who knows what the other half of that is.

Typically paraffin wax is the culprit.

It is a petroleum byproduct.

So when you burn it, you're burning chemicals into the air and then breathing them in, so airway irritants, all kinds of nasty stuff.

So I thought, I'll just go old school and I'll make it myself.

I'll know exactly what's in it.

And I like to laugh that I got a little carried away.

Here we are.

I really fell in love with the process, and I started, you know, just doing markets, the level that fired all is at now was a total accident.

You know, I lost my jobs during the pandemic, like a lot of people did, and my life kind of pivoted, and this became more of a life saving necessity.

I started a website and got a little studio in the Lincoln building, which was just across the street, and just started doing curbside candles for the pandemic.

But then I started to get shy knocks on my door.

Is there a candle store in here?

You know, I know it's just where I make up.

So it wasn't intended to turn into this.

But the building manager stopped by one day and said, you have a candle store in here?

And I'm like, No, I swear I don't.

And he offered me the first fire doll location, and said, Do you want a candle store?

And I thought, You know what?

Why not?

We use natural materials here, so we really focus on clean candles.

You know, you even you can feel it when you come in here.

I mean, it doesn't hit you the same way, like a, you know, a commercial candle place would.

It's the difference between an mp three and a vinyl record.

Now there's a richness to the fragrances that we use here that is that is just different.

The scent blending experience is really cool, because we offer an opportunity to time travel to, you know, travel around the world.

Our old factory sense is so connected to our memories that we can really play with nostalgia.

Here, when I was a kid, there was a honeysuckle Bush outside of my window at night in the summertime that that scent would come into the house, and it just, it really kind of takes me back.

And you can, you know, visit a relative.

I had a, you know, I've had a relative that anytime I smell roses, I think of this relative.

So you can go through and explore and just see what hits you.

We have folks that come in here and smell cinnamon, and they're no and others that are like, Oh, give me that all day.

So, you know, that's the.

Idea you can come in here and you can just make something that is completely your own, that matches your personality.

My favorite phrase that I hear and hear all the time is, hey, smell my spoon, because it's, you know, people get to kind of share their creations with their neighbors.

I always refer to this as an alternative gathering space, because it is.

It's not a bar, but we have a bar, you know, it's not a music venue, but we have a stage.

It's not just an art studio, but you can come make things here.

And I think that, you know, the pandemic changed us as a society, and I think that it made us really value being together more, because we were isolated for so long, and humans just are not made for isolation like that.

We were social creatures.

That's why we expanded so quickly.

Was because that was the thing that people seemed to want the most, was a place to be together, a place to connect.

And that's and that's really the big idea, is that you come in here and you can kind of get a break from stresses, from everything going so fast, you know, from a tiny, itty bitty, little office space across the street to this is, you know, what a dream.

So I it is, it's, it's nice to just kind of sit sometimes in it and get to know it, because it's moved very quickly.

So I'm still kind of getting to know this place, you know, I have a wonderful crew here, wonderful staff.

And we, we are exploring all the time.

We are, you know, kind of pushing the boundaries of what this place can do all the time.

I think the big thing about being in downtown Champaign is that it's a neighborhood.

It is a cool, hip, rad, fun neighborhood full of really cool, interesting people, cool, interesting stores, you know, I'm still the new kid on the block, you know.

So I'm learning so much every day, and a lot of it is from my fellow small business owners downtown.

You know, we show up in each other's shops all the time with questions and frustrations and celebrations and you know, everything in between.

We'll take you back to fire doll a little later in our show for a performance from soprano Elena negruzza.

Now on to another art form, poetry.

You know, Illinois has been home to many famous poets.

Ernest Hemingway was from Oak Park.

Carl Sandburg was from Galesburg.

Gwendolyn Brooks made her life in Chicago.

So on this season of prairie fire, we thought we'd introduce you to some poets you may not have heard of the first one is Michael C Holloway.

Michael Clark Holloway was from Mattoon, Illinois, originally, by the time he died in 2022 he published three books of poetry.

His work has been performed throughout the United States and throughout the world, at universities, clubs, on stage and off.

His work was well loved for integrating the struggles and the mundane aspects of everyday living with a sense of humor and musicality.

He was a consummate midwesterner in appearance and tone, but he was a student of the world.

He loved modern art, music and a good drink.

She's a groove.

She's absolutely wonderful.

She's full of energy.

She's real peppy, lot of spunk.

Spunk, spunky, super perky, peppy, spunky, perky, brisk.

She's vibrant and hearty, breezy and lively and sprightly.

She's quite vigorous, forceful, powerful, domineering over overbearing, meddlesome, arrogant, dictatorial, in other words, a real drag.

We're joined now by Michael Holloway's wife of nearly 50 years.

Penny Hannah.

Thank you for being here.

Penny, good to be here.

Tell me a little bit about Michael's childhood, and how did he become a poet.

His mother said he was a busy boy.

He was always thinking he was active person, but he lived in his mind more than his body.

So he wrote things down, because he always said writing is just another form of thinking.

And so from childhood, he was writing.

Throughout high school, he did more poetry, and then ended up at the University of Illinois, right?

Yes, he did some theater work.

He was a good observer of human behavior by that time, having been in.

School all those years.

So often he could invent characters and imitate characters.

His heart was in the arts, really.

And so he was interested in music.

Though he had no music training and performance was important to him, how you perform what is written or composed.

So he worked a lot with musicians.

So Sal martirano in the composition and Herbert brown he and he was very interested in modern art as well.

Yes, a lot of his poems reference paintings, particularly gogan and Cezanne.

He started as somebody who didn't have much background in music, but then he ended up with his association with salon martirano, yes, forming kind of a group of spelled word combined with music.

Well, he had a lot of things that he taught himself, and he had old guitars when he was a kid, and so he taught himself some things.

He had a very good ear, and he could reproduce sounds.

I mean, he could, you could have been a singer, but wasn't his style.

So tell me about their biggest collaboration.

So it was called L's GA it's well known in some parts of the world more than here.

It stands for Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and now you will find references to that all the time.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war.

Michael played a character called the politico who has stressed strangely so he had a gas mask and an aviator's helmet covering his whole face, sunglasses and a motorcycle jacket and light trousers.

And he did choreograph.

He did the choreography to move.

And so he recited the Lincoln Gettysburg Address, but he divided into three parts, and there were three different characters speaking, and then in poverty, he added some updates of his own writing.

It's interpreted as an anti war piece, he was also very good at capturing kind of the Midwest sensibility, Midwest life, the mundane aspects of everyday life.

Yes, one great example of that is this poem, walking up on a green down coat, walking up on a green down coat at the cold, damp late winter, first of the season, outdoor track meet.

My wife is leaping around for her slightly like an idiot, more like an adolescent.

Goodness, how my 14 year old son has grown and wears his mother's coat quite well.

I'm interested in the idea of what it was like to live with a poet.

The trick question his was, he was a tortured poet.

He was he always taking notes on napkins.

Was he?

Was he completely, you know, hard to talk to all the time.

I mean, what is it like to be married?

Okay, real life.

Michael had a grasp of things that nobody else was going to think about.

There was a woman who was a colleague at Parkland, and she said of him once, Michael Holloway says things that no one should even think about.

He was making things happen that were of his imagination, and in reference to the world, he thought that you observe very carefully everything around you, the colors, the shapes, the people, the sounds, and then you live that experience fully, and then you create something from it, basically.

So living with him, he would be tuned into things you wouldn't know about.

He liked less disturbance.

So during the time we had little children and we're raising them, he didn't write that much because it was he would rather be with the child experiencing that and seeing how they acted and what they were interested in, and helping them live the adventures that he had in his head.

The reason for the overalls is he had the bib with the pockets.

He kept note cards in the pockets.

At by his bedside weren't note cards and a pen, so he was constantly writing.

Michael was as masterful at setting kind of beautiful, peaceful, serene scenes as he was writing these irreverent, almost sometimes rude poems.

And I think the poem winter window wide is a beautiful example of that.

Winter window wide I dreamt a chandelier fell, crashed and scattered across the floor in shards, when actually my breath had frozen, fallen and shattered in mid snore by my head on the pillow and.

It as I lay sleeping in bed.

Muffle wrote a lot, but he didn't receive a huge amount of notoriety for his work.

Why?

Why do you feel that was and was that something that he even wanted?

Getting noticed takes a lot of work, too, and he didn't want to do that work.

If other people got it going, that was good.

He didn't have the drive for that.

And besides, he was working part time as a teacher, and we had two kids, so there was a little like, okay, teachers and part time teacher salaries don't pay for a lot of things.

So, yeah, I don't think he was that concerned.

He believed that the poetry should live in live performance.

He thought that was the way you produce the work, and people notice it.

When invited to do a reading, he would do a reading, paid or unpaid.

So he was into exhibiting it, but not all that business stuff that goes with getting promoted.

He didn't feel disappointed in that.

He did submit poems to Poetry Magazine several times, and they kept saying, This is really good stuff.

This is beautiful stuff.

We want short poems.

He liked to focus on big concepts like habit and time and memory and irony was one of the big hooks.

Contradiction, paradox at a reading, he would say, Well, what do you want to hear?

Poems pleasant or poems unpleasant?

And that was a joke.

But, you know, he went from very serious and did he leave anybody magnetic, beautiful, wavering, wandering poetry to ridiculous, hilarious.

You mentioned that Michael liked to employ irony in his poems quite a bit.

You had the example of that.

Well, we were getting married at the courthouse.

So two friends, Michael was in his overalls, and I was in my go to teach at high school clothing.

And so a man comes up and says, Can you sign this?

And he was looking for signatures to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

He was so interested in telling us, he then realized, wait always, people are dressed.

Why are you here?

He says to everybody, and he looks around and Michael says, Well, we're here for court.

And then he says, Well, what?

And he says, Well, my penny was arrested for shoplifting, and I am the witness against her.

And the guy says, Oh, really?

And he says, yeah.

Nobody cracks a smile, nobody smirks or grins.

And then he says, well, stutters and leaves.

Two Three years later, I walk into the same man, and he says to me, how did that trial run work out?

And I couldn't remember what he was talking about.

And I said, Try.

He says, Yeah, at the courthouse, you and Michael and some people who were there, and I said, Oh, my God, he's putting you on and that would be a perfect example.

And I don't know how many people you told that I was a shoplifter, but that's pretty indicative that he bought the whole thing anyhow.

Thank you so much for joining us.

It's my pleasure.

For more information about Michael Holloway's life and poetry, visit our website at will.illinois.edu/prairie, fire.

We end this episode back at fire doll studio for a performance from soprano Elena negruta.

Elena hails originally from Moldova, and she started her career as a folk singer before she immigrated to the United States, where she really discovered a love of opera.

She is the 2023 winner of the American prize for vocal performance.

Here she is singing Edith Piaf's in Alamo.

(Hymne a l'amour) (Hymne a l'amour) (Hymne a l'amour) (Hymne a l'amour) (Hymne a l'amour) (Ej, létala laatovka) (Ej, létala laatovka) (Ej, létala laatovka) (Ej, létala laatovka) (Ej, létala laatovka)