Fieldwork

A Forager's Memoir

By: Iliana Regan

Narrated by: Iliana Regan

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, Iliana 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 had 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 had 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.

©2023 Iliana Regan (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

Beautiful, comforting, and wistful all at once

Plenty of authors make me smirk. Plenty make me laugh out loud. An equal number make me teary, angry, or anxious. Others leave a genuine smile on my face. Few can skillfully accomplish all of those in a single work.

Iliana Regan is one of those few. She skillfully weaves together recollections, yearnings, and truths that made me feel deeply meaningful and visceral emotions throughout the entirety of Fieldwork.

I recommend this book for lovers of nature, food, memoir, authenticity, vulnerability, wonder, love, and family.

Loved every bit of this

A memoir of the senses—a perfect capture of an imperfect place and time. Her narration really added to the color of the story.

Beautifully written, interesting world

I really enjoyed how tied into Nature the author is, and her descriptions of forging for food in the forest to serve at her inn and other experiences in the wild, as well as life at her family’s earlier farm during childhood. She is a little downbeat but kept me listening. I admire all that she has accomplished in life.

Fantastic

I admit I picked this up for the foraging. That being said I wasn’t disappointed in the least.

The narrator- author- has a quiet, almost meditative voice that kept me engaged.

I wish her other books were available on audible.

Nostalgic Midwest Read

Listening to this book was a great experience coming from someone who has called The U.P. my home since 1999. It's funny how most of us have lived through similar stories and experiences.

Read this book, especially if you live in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It's a crunchy nature read that will bring you back to feelings of your childhood - good and bad.

Since reading this, I've already recommended it to half a dozen friends. Well done, Lane.

The story became more compelling

Had a little difficulty engaging with the authors story and style, but became increasingly interested and engaged. She had an unusual childhood, and is indeed herself a somewhat unusual person I had to re-listen to some of the beginning, but I was glad I did. It was intriguing how she interwove her life story with mushrooms, and how they grow and develop. And reproduce. I don’t have to be the

Lovely and heartbreaking walk through the woods

Sad that the book is over. Iliana let’s us in to her life and memories while weaving in the lessons from the natural world. You can tell that she is a forager in that she pays close attention and listens to what the wild world is saying. You can tell she is a chef in that she creatively combines those elements together with her heritage and experience in a way you would not have thought of. I LOVED that the author read it in her voice. It brought a depth and authenticity that the audio of burn the place didn’t quite have. I would recommend listening to this book while taking walks through the woods of northern Michigan if you can;)

Captivating

Really enjoyed this journey, especially read by the author. Many touchstones from my youth, the camp, plants, climate.

Interesting story but

Clearly an interesting individual but not a writer. Some biographies are best written by others.

Terrible Narration, Misleading Title

This is barely a cogent book. It’s repetitive, the author is a poor narrator. The story is more a series of vignettes filled with wall licking, imaginative parent baby making, privilege, alcoholism, child sexual assault and more.