Lisa Przystup

In the writer Lisa Przystup’s world, the jewels of each season have their moment on the stage. Painted cardboard swans and giant looping garlands deck the dining table at Christmastime. Come summer, the Catskills creeks beckon, and a farmer’s market watermelon wears a seatbelt home. Nature’s bounty is precious, and so is our time to savor it: That seems to be the central tenet of the life she shares with her husband, the musician Jonathon Linaberry, in the town of Delhi, New York. A decade ago, while still living in Brooklyn, they bought their house and the surrounding five acres. The arrival of the pandemic cemented a long-planned move. By the fall of 2020, Przystup’s book, Upstate: Living Spaces with Space to Live, made an uncannily timed debut, spotlighting a dozen creatively dressed homes at the precise moment when people were collectively rethinking their own. “It’s a survival tool in my toolkit to be able to find the wonder in the everyday, to be able to create these worlds of play,” she says, drawing a connection to her childhood love of Roald Dahl and other authors. “I was really introverted, and reading just offered me this entry point to these entire universes that were so fantastical.” Now at work on a second book, she’s looking forward to a drive out west to Tucson this spring, where the couple have an artists’ residency lined up. The sun will lead the way.

Interview by Lauren Regensdorf

What projects are you currently working on?

I am in the editing phase of a second book. Upstate was a situation where an editor from Monticelli reached out to me and said, “Hey, we have this idea for a book about upstate interiors and would love for you to write it.” That was really great for me because it wasn’t personal—I was reporting on other people, and I love telling other people’s stories. Somehow it had never occurred to me to write a book. I mean, I grew up loving to read. I went to school for creative writing and mass communication; I got my master's in journalism. So it felt like a really great assignment: I could see how the sausage is made and put myself through the paces. I had nothing to lose. After that, my agent asked, “So what do you think about book number two?” And I was like, “I actually don’t think about book number two.” I didn’t want to write another book just to write another book.

A solid three or four years passed before my mom, seeing the knotweed where I live, described this really visceral memory of being a little girl living in a rural area outside Tokyo. She and her brothers would gather knotweed and bring it back to her mom so she could make this mochi called kusa mochi. It almost sounds like a storybook, the way she described going to the stream and catching crickets to put in little bamboo cages. It made me start thinking about what makes a house a home, how the seasons shape that, how these memories are so intrinsic to who we are and the way we move through the world. And of course, being here full-time, feeling closer to nature, I started noticing these things that I didn’t notice when I lived in the city. When the goldenrod starts popping up at the beginning of August, I’m now like, “Oh, it is over. Summer is leaving us.” I wanted the second book to be essentially that: the story of how we move through the year with the seasons as our benchmarks.

What scent from the natural world stirs up memories?

I lived in Arizona for a bit, and for me it’s the creosote bushes. The deserts outside Tucson are so beautiful—they are really as verdant as a desert can be. During the monsoon season, every day around late afternoon there would just be a deluge. The rain brings out the oils in the leaves, and the smell is indescribable.

What is your favorite time of year, and is there a favorite nature element?

Summer is my most favorite season. The windows are so fleeting when the fruits and vegetables are at their peak. Strawberry season here is two weeks, max. If you have a tomato at peak tomato season, it feels almost spiritual. Tomato sashimi, it’s jeweled and gorgeous and so flavorful, and all you have to do is drizzle some olive oil and put a little salt on it. There’s so much happening flavor-wise in your mouth—even just emotionally. Eating a peach when it’s so juicy, you have to eat it standing over the sink. These are my favorite moments of summer.

When do you feel most beautiful?

When I’ve been in the sun and I’ve got a little color to my skin and all my muscles are totally relaxed, totally unspooled. There’s just such a simplicity to it. I feel so at home in my body in that scenario. I think when you feel so good in your own body, that is when you feel the most beautiful—you exude that.

What beauty or self-care ritual keeps you going?

Hot showers. That’s it. That’s the very first thing that comes to mind for me. I like an evening shower. It feels like a good thing to do at the end of the day, and I like knowing that I’m going to be in for the night.

What activity keeps you unplugged from the internet?

Walking our dog. Our dog, Gus, is a sporting dog, and he has a lot of energy to burn off. Being here, we have access to all these great trails, and we have friends whose farms have tons of acreage. We usually take him for two hour-long walks a day, and it's a great way to just get out of the house and away from screens.

Who do you consider to be a beauty inspiration?

Stella Blackmon is a really incredible visual artist and filmmaker. She makes a lot of shorts. Beauty to me is about storytelling and the ability to capture and reframe the everyday, imbuing it with emotion and grace and sentimentality and wonder. She does this in her work in a really incredible way.

When have you recently cried because something was beautiful?

I am a perpetual crier. I feel moved by so many things. One poem that always gets me is Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones,” the one about convincing your child that the world is a beautiful place. Every time I read it out loud, I’m just crying. Or The Nutcracker. We have this tradition of going to the one at Lincoln Center, and there’s one piece for the principal dancers where the Tchaikovsky is so epic and the dance is so gorgeous. I always end up bawling at that.

What is your sun sign—and moon and rising, if you want to share—and are there characteristics that resonate with you?

My sun sign is Taurus, my moon is Aries, and my rising is Libra. The Aries really threw me. I remember taking it to friends and family and being like, “I’m not fiery. That doesn’t make any sense.” And they were like, “Do you even know yourself?” The characteristics that really resonate for me with Taurus and also with Libra is that they’re both ruled by Venus, and Venus is the planet of beauty and art and feeding yourself with those things. That feels so correct for me.

What do you collect, and why does it delight you?

I collect so many things, but collecting pieces of nature really makes me happy, like a beautiful rock from a beach. In the North Fork, all those beaches are so rocky and all the stones are so smooth. My husband has basically been like, “You can’t bring any more rocks home. We have no more horizontal surfaces.” So in a way, it’s a great exercise because it teaches you to appreciate beauty for what it is in that moment and then just say, “Okay, you just stay here.” And I just have that memory of it. The best part is that you’re not looking at price tags. I like to arrange them into all the pinks, all the dusty gray blues. That’s how I manage to scratch the itch, by collecting them and arranging them and then taking a photo. And then I will keep one.

What book or movie has left an impression on you?

I read North Woods last spring, and I loved that book—the descriptions of the seasons and of winter specifically. The movie The Taste of Things, with Juliette Binoche and her ex, Benoît Magimel, who plays opposite her, is slow and beautiful and quiet. It’s about cooking and is gorgeously shot. It’s just really moving.