Diana Evans – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Diana Evans is a British novelist, journalist and critic. Evans was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction for her third novel, Ordinary People (2018), which was a New Yorker, New Statesman and Financial Times book of the year, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. She is a former dancer and an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

These are a few of her favourite things. 

Making clothes

My grandfather was a tailor so it runs in the family. There is almost nothing more transporting to me than being completely engrossed in a sewing project while listening to an audiobook. This year I’ve made five dresses and a jumpsuit, mostly out of African wax fabrics. I love the process of assembling threads, buttons, zips and following a pattern to the letter, to then finish up with something you can wear. It’s a pastime that started in my twenties (I remember making a patchwork duvet cover when I was at university), and that I returned to feverishly, as a rescuing escape, during lockdown. It’s a wonderful feeling to wear something you have made yourself and it has greatly reduced my Topshop/Zara/Mango consumption. I see something and think, Meh, I could make that myself without compromise or exploitation.

Reading and writing

These are actually two of my major favourite things but I’m condensing into one here because they’re such obvious loves for a writer. They make me who I am. If a day goes by when I have not done either I get quite crazed, so I always have a book or two with me, as well as a notebook, for writing notes about the book I’m reading or the one that I’m writing, or about something else entirely that just needs to be written down. Writing is an essential act of transcribing and recording life, of bearing witness and giving voice. I like to read most of all at night before sleep and am often reading five or six books at once, a combination or poetry, fiction and nonfiction – a bad, mind-cluttering habit, but there is always so much I want to read. Books are friends to me. They’re alive.

Dance

Cuban especially. Senegalese, Jamaican, Afrobeats, straight R&B-pop. Or just flinging the body around a room with no form in mind. When Aretha Franklin died a couple of years ago I danced in the living room with my son and imagined her onward journey. There is some truly fine movement in music videos and I can watch them for hours of a Saturday afternoon. Having such a sedentary job as writing, dance is a crucial way of loosening up my thinking and shaking myself out. I like kitchen discos. I miss the feeling of being in a club or at a gig full of people dancing, all high on one music, and I hope we can eventually return to that freedom and physical connection. Two of the best dances I have ever had were in a reggae bashment in Jamaica and a salsa session in Santiago de Cuba, both with men I did not know but who could dance very well.

The Summer Picnic

Every summer aunties, mothers, nephews and cousins, dads and uncles of my clan gather in a park with food and games on a mass of mats on the grass. It’s usually Hyde Park, by the lake so those of us who blade can do so along the strip while listening to music, or Dulwich Park in South London. We spend the whole day there playing badminton, frisbee, cricket, dancing, sometimes learning circus skills, and catching up with one another about the months gone by. This year was special because lots of us hadn’t seen each other since Christmas. At the end of the day there’s a noisy sprint race across the grass which leaves us lying on the ground panting and laughing. It is a day is pure familial love and outdoor happiness, a highlight of my year.

Playing piano

It’s taken me around two years to work my way through the first volume of the children’s series Piano Time and I still can play only quite basic tunes smoothly – Blowing in the Wind, Uptown Girl, the theme tune from Howard’s End – but it’s a joy. The inclination to learn came from going into music shops for my kids’ lessons and shopping for a piano in Soho (walking around central London is another one of my favourite things). Musical instrument shops are heartwarming places, full of sonic nerds and drifting notes. I love the intense concentration required to read music and the sense of triumph that comes when the song begins to sound like itself coming from your own hands. I’m currently attempting Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend, which will probably take some months. I like to sing along too.