Monday, May 1, 2023


Watch the Recording on YouTube

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 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.

Iliana Regan is a Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur in the Hiawatha National Forest, and owner of The Milkweed Inn in Wetmore, Michigan. She received one Michelin star for each year she owned and operated Elizabeth Restaurant in Chicago, Illinois from 2012-2020.

Regan was born (1979) in Merrillville, Indiana. Her mother was a scratch cook and her steelworker father was a gardener. She and her three older sisters grew up on a 10-acre farm. She studied chemistry at Indiana University Bloomington before earning a degree in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. In the spring of 2022 she earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.