Iliana Regan is a Michelin-starred chef and owner of Milkweed Inn deep in the Hiawatha Forest. Regan’s memoir, Fieldwork, recently celebrated its paperback release. It couldn’t have come at a better time to show readers the power and resiliency of the land we walk on and take advantage of despite the signals that we have gone too far. Fieldwork is Regan’s own deep dig into land and family, and the contradictions existing in those two realms. It is a spiritual quest, if you believe in the power of pollen, to find something lost. It is honest, filled with equal parts fear and awe for what surrounds us, and will make you see the beauty in what remains and what is yet to sprout.
Nurtured in nature, Regan’s own sense of awe for what the land offered and how it all connected to us humans, began, naturally, while digging a dog out of an outhouse hole. Despite their beloved four-legged family member being covered in feces and beyond, Regan’s focus was on the intricate web of roots under the surface, so intertwined and strong, it could have held like a hammock. Fieldwork spans Regan’s early childhood, mixing memory and current day, as they reckon with long formed anxieties, sleepless nights and obsessions. But even with the usual introspection and self-awareness that comes with a memoir, the still throbbing heart of Regan’s book is their curiosity and appreciation for what the land provides. Never has there been a book that will make you look at the possibilities of what we eat and how to make sure we foster a healthy relationship with what has been offered to us and to all that may be hungry. Or how we eat or who we eat it with, Regan savors, saves, and replenishes, allowing all to devour the goodness of what is offered.
The current day stream of narrative reflects on the day to day of Milkweed Inn, of Regan’s own desires to leave the intensity of the life of a renowned chef behind to focus on something more fruitful and fitting. And while hearing about the sounds of nature, the quiet nights and the fanciful and foraged cuisine is enticing on its own, the familial intricacies of those urges towards nature are what make Fieldwork and Regan’s work flourish. Regan has a way of describing deeply flawed human beings plagued with alcoholism, depression, rage, amongst the other venoms that twist their ways into our own veins and roots. But never once does a reader feel the lack of love amongst those sitting at Regan’s family table. Even while searching for a beloved mushroom, Regan reminisces, “They tasted like how good it felt to be with all my family in the same room at once.” Rare and relished but all the more enjoyed, especially in memory.
Regan seems to be one of the few who can see the contradictions in both people and land with compassion. Even the loggers doing the work Regan despises are granted grace for doing their job, for knowing and taking from the land albeit in a different way than Regan. Even amidst the deforestation, the lack of bird calls, and the ruins of a mapped world of wild fauna hunting grounds, Regan finds a way to see new and old life persisting. At the conclusion of the book, Regan is in the middle of a recently logged patch of wild, all tire rutted dirt and stacks of felled trees and in what the reader would see as despair, and even Regan at the beginning of the book, instead Regan writes “In this logged field I found joy, distilled.”
That very resiliency, the power to return, not wholly the same, changed but still wild and true to the ground rooted into, is true to Regan’s nature as well. Regan understands the messages of the natural world and in Fieldwork, deciphers them for us, all the while weaving her own tale of recreation and the pondering of truest form.
Fieldwork is available at most bookstores and through the publisher's website.