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With the publication of her first memoir, Burn the Place, Michelin-starred chef Iliana Regan carved a space for herself between the culinary world and the literary world. She was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award, the first food writer recognized since Julia Child. The New Yorker distinguished Burn the Place as one of “the great memoirs of addiction, of gender ambivalence and queer coming-of-age,” and the New York Times called it “perhaps the definitive Midwest drunken-lesbian food memoir.” Then living in Chicago, Regan was also lauded regionally. She won the 2019 CHIRBy Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir from the Society of Midland Authors.
A restaurateur and writer, Regan possesses a “funky, foraged, magic-realist vision of the Midwest”—as culinary critic Jeff Gordinier described her Chicago restaurant, Elizabeth. It’s no wonder, then, that Regan sought out the Midwest’s dense forests for her next endeavor. In 2019, she left the day-to-day management of Elizabeth to her employees and—after moving into a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with her wife—they opened Milkweed Inn. Foraging, cooking, writing: Regan continued these activities in tandem. From the Wifi-spotty Upper Peninsula, she completed an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, shaping what would become her second memoir.
Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir skillfully handles Regan’s core themes of androgyny, body dysmorphia, queerness, trauma, addiction, and culinary self-expression. But compared with Burn the Place, Regan keeps her sharp eyes pressed on the mushrooms peppering the forests that made her. A forager’s memoir, Fieldwork is as concerned with the forager as the foraged. Mushrooms are ripe for cutting; so, too, are Regan’s family memories, whether on her childhood farm in Indiana or in her grandmother Busia’s native Poland. In each chapter, Regan maps out her inheritance of trauma and tradition, marking the sites where her past became a fear or her family stories became a craving for Busia’s duck blood soup, with its fairytale borowiki mushrooms. The result of Regan’s latest creation? Evocatively earthen.
Elizabeth McNeill
The book is filled with quiet moments of reading and writing on your porch while watching your wild neighbors: birds, insects, trees and, at one point, wolves. Did you write Fieldwork in this way, sitting on the porch between weekends of hosting guests at the Milkweed Inn? Did you write in a notebook or did this memoir find life on yellow legal pads, like the hand-drawn map you carry while foraging?
Iliana Regan
Yes, I wrote the entire book outside. Even when I was writing in the winter in Chicago, I did it outside, bundled and next to my fire pit. It was my routine to be outside. I wrote it all while on my computer and sometimes while on my phone (when it was very very cold). Occasionally I might have taken a note on paper or legal pad but my method was sort of ritualistic.
Elizabeth McNeill
Throughout Fieldwork, you beautifully narrate your family’s history of food and foraging, and how you all created culinary traditions combining your European heritage with the flora and fauna of Indiana. At one point, you describe your great-grandmother Grandma Sciara who, upon emigrating from Italy, “brought her memories to America in the form of food.” Do you think recipes are the main place family memories—the good and the bad—are stored and passed along, if we look (and taste) closely enough?
Iliana Regan
There’s a lot of grandmothers and great grandmothers in the book and grandmother Sciara was my dad’s friend’s grandmother. My great grandmother was Busia from Poland. But to your point, I think everything comes along with us, especially in the form of nourishment. Sort of like that saying “we are what we eat.” I think there’s something to that.
Elizabeth McNeill
A major theme throughout the book is hospitality. Not only are you and your wife attentive to your guests’ experience at the Milkweed Inn, but you also consider while foraging how your actions affect the other creatures in the forest. What does the ideal practice of hospitality look like for you?
Iliana Regan
The ideal practice of hospitality would be caring for others in a way that is most genuine to yourself. We don’t try to fit into any sort of standards. Our main goal is to make others feel comfortable in what has sort of become our own little world.
Elizabeth McNeill
I was struck by your attention to homemaking in the most literal, nonanthropomorphic sense: a drive to create a safe place for ourselves and our loved ones. Warbler mothers do it for their young, and so do we. Has your idea of “home” changed with setting up a home off the grid?
Iliana Regan
There was something about nests that kept reoccurring for me and came out through the book and writing. I think it was how much I was paying attention to the birds and other animals, but also how much I was feeling unsafe at the moment with the pandemic and political climate. I think my idea of home is where my family is—my wife and dogs, and beyond that my mom, sisters, dad, nieces, nephews. I think no matter what, home is inside of you.
Elizabeth McNeill
Fieldwork comes back, again and again, to loss: loss endured (grief) and loss anticipated (fear). How has writing this book helped you account for loss and, maybe, search for a higher power to make sense of that loss?
Iliana Regan
I like how you say loss endured (grief) and loss anticipated (fear). That’s such a good way to put it. Does everyone in the world think of it that way and I missed it or did you come up with that? It’s brilliant. Anyways, it hasn’t taken me back to a higher power in the way a 12-step program once took me to one. It’s been more of a search within myself for strength and understanding and tolerance and love. And I guess, letting go.
Elizabeth McNeill
What, for you, unites foraging, cooking, and writing (or any combination thereof)? How has that changed between your first memoir, Burn the Place, and your second?
Iliana Regan
I think the unity of these things is in the creativity I get to explore. The foraging inspires me to cook. I use the same part of my brain when I’m writing as I do with cooking. When I’m thinking of food, I’m doing it sort of as an architect or chemist. And I’m doing the same thing when I’m writing. But there’s also this deep place it all comes from, partly intuition, partly who I am. It’s my creative channel. Maybe it all, in some way, is me communing with a higher power.
Elizabeth McNeill
What one dish would you cook to convince a mushroom skeptic that mushrooms are delicious, generous, sexy, and thought-provoking?
Iliana Regan
I would cook wild sheep’s head mushrooms just like my mom used to. Dredged in flour and spices and shallow fried in butter, eaten while still hot.
NONFICTION
Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir
By Iliana Regan
Agate Midway
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