Fieldwork: A Forager's Memoir

Iliana Regan's gripping culinary memoir Burn the Place won praise from a wild variety of sources, including literary figures and her professional colleagues.

Now, in this second book, she vividly recounts her effort to build a restaurant centered on foraged foods, a place that, like so many, was just beginning to take off when COVID disrupted everything.

The pandemic was not the only unexpected force Regan and her new wife had to contend with as they settled in to the remote Michigan wilderness. Writing with the same frankness she brought to her first book, Regan addresses personal and family issues that are highlighted by dislocation and isolation, as well as tensions of American culture that play out in the small towns and woods around them.

One of her gifts as a writer—or perhaps it's a skill she has honed through determination and hard work—is her ability to identify and pursue what's important to her, even as she recognizes that she has to find a way of working with those who think otherwise. In Fieldwork, that insight is a source of illumination, even if it cannot solve every problem.

Hardcover.