From National Book Award-nominee 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 Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Fieldwork explores
how Regan's complex gender identity informs her acclaimed work as a
chef and her profound experience of the natural world. Not long
after Iliana Regan's 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 star-winning 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 Michigan's 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, Regan's 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 she'd long expressed as a chef, but
experienced most intensely growing up. On her family's 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 countryside-especially her
grandfather's 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, who'd 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
Jennie's Cafe, a restaurant that fed generations of local
steelworkers. He also shared with Iliana a steady supply of sharp
knives and-as she got older-guns. Iliana's mother had family
stories as well-not only of her own years marrying young, raising
headstrong girls, and cooking at Jennie's, 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 Regan's family are darker, riven with alcoholism and
domestic strife too often expressed in the harm, physical and
otherwise, perpetrated by men-harm men do to women and families,
and harm men do to the entire landscapes they occupy. As Regan
explores the ancient landscape of Michigan's boreal forest, her
stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of
plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna's
efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that's 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 land's different mushroom species appear-even as
surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by
logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area's
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 obsession-all 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.
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