Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir

Regan’s (Burn the Place) second memoir focuses on her relationship with the natural world. Hailing from a long line of foragers, she shares stories of her childhood homesteading on a farm in rural Indiana. She juxtaposes memories of her family with the current phase of her career, having left her Michelin-starred restaurant behind for the remote forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There, she and her wife opened the Milkweed Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in the Hiawatha National Forest. Regan charts the b-and-b’s operating challenges with the onset of COVID and her own relapse into addiction. In this self-narrated audio memoir, Regan’s depictions of nature are evocative. Her detailed descriptions of the land, the food she harvests, and the meals she creates illustrate her passion for the land. She also frankly discusses her complicated relationship with gender and sexuality, from wanting a male body as a child to her difficulties conceiving a child as an adult.