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 Café, 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.
General
Imprint: |
Surrey Books,U.S.
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
March 2024 |
Authors: |
Iliana Regan
|
Dimensions: |
215 x 139mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
344 |
Edition: |
2nd edition |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-57284-332-5 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-57284-332-2 |
Barcode: |
9781572843325 |
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