Iliana Regan + Sophia Roe: Fieldwork - A Forager's Memoir

828 Broadway,New York NY 10003

26 January, 2023

Description

Join us for an in-person event with Michelin-starred chef and author Iliana Regan for a discussion of her new memoir Fieldwork: A Forager's Memoir. Joining Iliana in conversation is James Beard Award winning writer and chef Sophia Roe. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street. Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Fieldwork here. STRAND IN-PERSON EVENT COVID-19 POLICY: All patrons may be required to provide proof of vaccination and/or wear a mask *per the author’s discretion. An email will be sent to all attendees 24 hours prior to the event with updated vaccination and masking requirements. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. Iliana Regan has been a Michelin Star Chef since 2014. She is the chef and owner of the Milkweed Inn in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. On numerous occasions the James Beard Foundation nominated her as Best Chef Great Lakes. In 2016 Food and Wine named her as one of the Best Chefs in America. In 2019 her first memoir, Burn the Place, was longlisted for the National Book Award, the first time a food writer was nominated since Julia Child in 1979. Burn the Place won the Midland Authors Prize and Story Studio Chicago Prize in nonfiction. She has her Masters of Fine Arts in Writing from the Art Institute of Chicago and spends every moment she can surrounded by the natural world with pencil in hand jotting down what she sees. Sophia Roe is a James Beard Award winning chef, writer, and Emmy-Award nominated TV host known for her distinct lens on honesty, diversity, and inclusivity. Roe’s work is built on the foundation of celebrating the beauty and art in cooking while creating resources to advance food justice, build more sustainable and equitable systems, and combat industry whitewashing. A natural and powerful storyteller, her community extends from her Instagram and YouTube platforms to “Counter Space,” a VICE TV show she produces and hosts — for which she was nominated twice for a Daytime Emmy, notably as the first Black woman in the culinary category. In 2022, Roe won James Beard Award for emerging voice in “broadcast media,” Roe dedicates much of her time to supporting and empowering young people through her involvement with organizations including Women’s Prison Association, Edible Schoolyard NYC, and The Fungi Foundation. Roe currently resides in Brooklyn, NY and spends most of her free time writing, obsessing over fungi, and cooking as much as she can in her studio, Apartment Miso. She is currently penning her first book.