Fieldwork: A Forager''s Memoir

From National Book Awardnominee Iliana Regan, a new memoir of her life and heritage as a forager, spanning her ancestry in Eastern Europe, her childhood in rural Indiana, and her new life set in the remote forests of Michigans Upper Peninsula. Fieldwork explores how Regans complex gender identity informs her acclaimed work as a chef and her profound experience of the natural world.

Not long after Iliana Regans celebrated debut, Burn the Place, became the first food-related title in four decades to become a National Book Award nominee in 2019, her career as a Michelin starwinning chef took a sharp turn north. Long based in Chicago, she and her new wife, Anna, decided to create a culinary destination, the Milkweed Inn, located in Michigans remote Upper Peninsula, where much of the food served to their guests would be foraged by Regan herself in the surrounding forest and nearby river. Part fresh challenge, part escape, Regans move to the forest was also a return to her rural roots, in an effort to deepen the intimate connection to nature and the land that shed long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.

On her familys farm in rural Indiana, Regan was the beloved youngest in a family with three much older sisters. From a very early age, her relationship with her mother and father was shaped by her childhood identification as a boy. Her father treated her like the son he never had, and together they foraged for mushrooms, berries, herbs, and other wild food in the surrounding countrysideespecially her grandfathers nearby farm, where they also fished in its pond and young Iliana explored the accumulated family treasures stored in its dusty barn. Her father would share stories of his own grandmother, Busia, whod helped run a family inn while growing up in eastern Europe, from which she imported her own wild legends of her native forests, before settling in Gary, Indiana, and opening Jennies Café, a restaurant that fed generations of local steelworkers. He also shared with Iliana a steady supply of sharp knives andas she got olderguns.

Ilianas mother had family stories as wellnot only of her own years marrying young, raising headstrong girls, and cooking at Jennies, but also of her father, Wayne, who spent much of his boyhood hunting with the men of his family in the frozen reaches of rural Canada. The stories from this side of Regans family are darker, riven with alcoholism and domestic strife too often expressed in the harm, physical and otherwise, perpetrated by menharm men do to women and families, and harm men do to the entire landscapes they occupy.

As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigans boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Annas efforts to make a home and a business of an inn thats suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the lands different mushroom species appeareven as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the areas birds. Along the way she struggles not only with the threat of COVID, but also with her personal and familial legacies of addiction, violence, fear, and obsessionall while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.

With Burn the Place, Regan announced herself as a writer whose extravagant, unconventional talents matched her abilities as a lauded chef. In Fieldwork, she digs even deeper to express the meaning and beauty we seek in the landscapes, and stories, that reveal the forces which inform, shape, and nurture our lives.