Review | A love letter to the land — and the bounty it offers
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Regan’s new book, “Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir,” is held together by mycelial architecture. Mushrooms connect her to her forebears. Great-grandmother Busia from a village in northern Poland used boletus to give czarnina, duck blood soup, the flavor of the forest. Regan spent countless childhood hours searching for wild mushrooms among the oak, pine and hemlock of rural Indiana with her father. She watched keenly as her mother cleaned and sliced the day’s find on the counter island in their farmhouse kitchen. Wild mushrooms even made an appearance in the hospital room not long after her birth. Today, she collects them on her land in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and serves them to guests at the Milkweed Inn, which she owns and runs with her wife, Anna.
“Fieldwork” is Regan’s second book, and although it is a love letter to the land on which she lives and a broadside against those behind deforestation, it covers still more extensive ground. Braided into sections about the Milkweed Inn and its guests are tales of Regan’s homestead childhood. In affectingly honest and nuanced portraits, she describes her mother and father. Struggles with addiction — her family’s as surely as her own — are a weighty and constant presence.
Throughout, Regan examines her loved ones — and herself — with intense, sometimes painful honesty. No one emerges at the end of the book as entirely good or bad (save, perhaps, for Busia, Regan’s culinary foremother). That fine shading lends a truth to her prose, nowhere more so than when she recounts how in June 2020, after more than a decade of sobriety, she started drinking again.
The movies tell us that alcoholics relapse in moments of tremendous anguish — a divorce, say, or the death of a child. Far more in line with reality, it seems to me, is how Regan presents it: “Everything and nothing happened, that’s sort of how things like this go. One day your shoe comes untied and the next day you’re having a glass of whiskey.”
These sections give “Fieldwork” an immense intimacy, as if the reader were sitting beside Regan, listening to her tell her story with candor and vulnerability rather than encountering it as text, at a distance, as a stranger. Regan also excels where her love for the outdoors and her skill as a chef meet. She writes about nature — especially edible nature — with care and fervor. Her prose comes alive when she tells us how wild game tastes of berries and grubs, acorns and cedar. She describes rubbing down the tenderloin of a mule deer with homemade white bean and wild rose miso, and then hanging it above an open fire. She calls on us to look at nature — and indeed at eating — in new ways and to reconsider what might count as an ingredient. Young nettles, she notes, give a dish substance. Woodruff adds flavors of tarragon and vanilla. Gooseberry leaves bring tannins. In these moments, Regan is highly effective. You can hear the hiss of fat dripping into the flames. You ask yourself about the sensation of wild greens against your tongue.
At times, Regan falters in her writer’s craft. She occasionally gets lost in a labored or shopworn simile (mushrooms like penises, excitement in the gut like butterflies). In some paragraphs, she layers comparisons so abundantly that they blur into one another, none evoking an image or holding the power she intends. These flaws make some sections of “Fieldwork” uneven. A sentence might contain one too many subclauses. A metaphor might obscure rather than brighten.
Nevertheless, the achievement of the book remains intact. Regan is at her most potent when she is reflecting on the present. In passages ruminating about her attempts to have a child with Anna, her writing grows incandescent. As with most of what she discusses in “Fieldwork,” she describes procreation — and the hardship it sometimes brings — in a forager’s parlance. “The wind is good at carrying pollen and spores too, like how sometimes little mushrooms sprout from the soil of the plants in our windowsills. Anna inseminating me was like that — like the chances of the wind.” Here, Regan’s simile strikes true.
If you’re in search of a guide to foraging, this is not your book. “Fieldwork” offers little to those hoping to find porcinis or pick wild herbs — and that isn’t its goal. Although the natural world exists as an undercurrent in every paragraph, what propels a reader to the book’s final pages are the people Regan writes about (herself chief among them) and the stories she tells.
But after reading “Fieldwork,” you still might find yourself casting a suspicious eye at the button mushrooms wrapped in plastic film at the local supermarket. This is Regan’s other lasting accomplishment. Although never sanctimonious, she summons her readers to the forest. She reminds us of nature’s great variety. She calls on us to look with new eyes at what we may once have considered pests (like nettles) or merely part of the scenery (like cedar, which she uses to flavor custard). Anyone who has tasted nettle soup or eaten fresh chanterelles, simmered in cream and onion, spooned over toasted sourdough bread, will heartily agree.
Makana Eyre is a writer based in Paris. His book of nonfiction about music in the Nazi camps will be published in May.
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