As a suburban kid growing up in Northern Virginia, Lisa Przystup spent a large chunk of time in nature. She’d take to the trails on her bike, pausing to marvel at tadpoles and wriggly snakes. And she’d collect rocks, so many rocks. Lisa might say she is genetically predisposed to the magic of “outside”, that her entire family is wired for this kind of studied observation.
On a family trip to Japan, Lisa’s musician husband, Jonathon Linaberry, commented on the way each member of her family—mother, father, and brother—stopped to look at a flower, or slowed their gait to track a scent, or delighted in the discovery of some very small thing.
“We all move through the world in this way,” says Lisa.
In her newest book, Once Around the Sun, published in October, Lisa takes the reader through 365 days of noticing, chronicling life from the 1800s farmhouse in the Western Catskills that she and her husband call home. This is technically Lisa’s second book, but one could argue that Once Around the Sun is her spiritual firstborn.
The lifestyle and design writer, now two-time author, known for her creative musings, DIY spirit, impeccable taste, and down-to-earth persona as @brass__tacks on Instagram has poured much of herself into the book’s pages.
Once Around The Sun is a treatise on beauty, combining the natural splendor of Upstate New York with Lisa’s poetic prose where Fall is “golden alchemy” and tablescapes become altars to the ephemeral. Lisa weaves the cadence of ordinary life with extraordinary depth and reverence, a skill born from a life built on such devotion.
Both aspirational and tangible, the book is a manual for a kind of presence, guided by imagery, recipes, and essays that traverse landscapes of memory and feeling. There are quotes quietly footnoting the pages and micro-stories disguised as captions for the gorgeous photographs captured by Kate Foster and John Hesselbarth.
We asked Lisa and her keen eye to curate a collection of her favorite items from East Fork which you’ll find here. We also got to ask her a few questions.
Lisa is a tastemaker, yes. But she is also a breath of fresh air, a rare find in today’s socially saturated world. Fanny Singer writes of Lisa in the afterword, that she is “sensitized to the poetry of small gestures”. May we all be so attuned.
Here is Lisa, in her own words:
How does it feel to put this book, your book, into the world?
Oh it's terrifying. There is a real safety in reporting—[my first book] Upstate wasn't about me, it was about telling other people's stories. This book is incredibly personal, it really matters to me (Upstate did too, just in a different way), but this book feels like an extension of me in a way that Upstate did not. I recently watched an interview with the poet Ocean Vuong and he put it so well, "There's a lot of self fear...we live in an age of perennial judgement. It's created a lot of hesitation around acting as a human being. On my best days as a writer I get the work done because my desire to have a voice outpaces my terror of being alive...but I think that right now we have built a culture that has induced more terror than a desire to take risks." This really sums it up perfectly.
For those who may not know, where did the name Brass Tacks come from?
Back when blogs were a thing—So, like 15 years ago? Is that right?—I had the thought I wanted to start one but I dreamed way too big and stalled out because my vision was beyond my scope of execution (I tend to do that, which is why I need an editor). Anyways, the idea behind it was to focus on the fundamentals/essentials and not all the other noise out there—to get down to the heart of the matter. When IG first came on the scene, I was like, "Well, it never became a blog but maybe it can just be my handle." I have been thinking that the grown-up choice would be to change my handle to my name but tbd.
The guest essays in your book add a widening lens to the themes of seasonal ritual and food memory—how did you choose the writers, and what made you want to include them in the book?
I wanted the contributing essays to reflect a variety of experiences and in doing so show all the different ways we move through a world shaped by the seasons and in sharing them highlight the shared collective memory of the seasons across all these different experiences—what's in season informs what we cook with, which informs what we eat, which informs how we care for each other and nourish our bodies—it feels really obvious but I also think it's really powerful.
We’re entering fall and headed towards winter’s inward journey. In the vein of your seasonal to-do lists, what rituals and activities are you looking forward to in November?
Watching the leaves change, that moment when a gust of wind showers them all around you. The beauty and heartbreak of the first frost. Post sunset hot pink skies. The smell of fireplaces in the night air.
How did you come to know East Fork?
I’ve been an East Fork fangirl for a very long time, at least 10 years??
I have a collecting problem. I was at my parent’s house recently and my room was frozen in time—it had all these rocks and geodes. Rocks were the gateway, then it was books and J. Crew catalogs. Now I have a ceramics problem.
Dream East Fork color combos?
Oof, this one is hard. There are so many beautiful colors. Morel is my favorite standalone. Longleaf paired with Tulip Crown in Verdant are really lovely together.
