Courtia Newland

It’s very hard for Courttia Newland to stay in one discipline. Whether as a playwright or novelist, the 34-year-old is driven by the urge to tell the best story.

As a playwright with the Post Office theatre in 1997, he enjoyed a nine-year stint of sold-out shows that ranged from a full length version of Estate of Mind, to a modern adaptation of Trojan Women, to the original two-act play The Far Side.
This was after publishing – at 21 years old – his first novel, “The Scholar,” a story about the lives of third generation children of West Indian immigrants living in London. Since then, “I got three novels, a novella, and I’ve got a book of short-stories,” Newland said.

His latest offering, “Music for the Off-Key,” is inspired by horror movies and everyday life in West London that results in stories delighting “in the dark, the grotesque and the uncanny,” according to the News From Nowhere website. “He’s captured the pulse of people you can relate to. You read these stories – the horizon of those people’s lives. That’s the horizon you look at, and that you’re familiar with,” said poet Teri Ellen Cross, who – along with her husband poet Hayes Davis – met Newland when they traveled to London last summer. “There’s this authenticity and realism to it that makes it kind of alive that you can appreciate in a lot of good ways.”

Newland’s presence in the US is a result of a three-year relationship between Georgetown University and the British Council.
The four-week Writer in Residence program, which he completed in October, places British writers “into a community welcomed with faculty and students to talk about contemporary UK in a way that will open up dialogue between” them and people from other countries, said Sarah Frankland, the council’s deputy director. For Newland, contemporary UK consists of him going against the current trend of post-colonial literature that deals solely with migration, identity, and belonging. “Yes, my ancestors are African. Yes, my direct ancestors are Caribbean,” he said. But “I am a black British person and I’m quite comfortable with that.”

Instead, Newland’s broad source of motivation includes the lack of stories about black British people from a contemporary standpoint, which he deals with in his second book, “Society Within.”
“The next novel I’m going to work on is going to be a historical novel set in Jamaica,” Newland said. “That’s not, in a sense, black British. But it’s still an untold story.”

Another theme he explores is black sexuality through his recently completed manuscript “Minx” – which, according to the Words of Colour website – explores the widening gap between the black middle classes and the black working classes through the story of a girl, nicknamed Minx, whose relationship with the main male character sets off a series of events.
Moving forward, Newland was awarded a Writer in Residency at Montgomery College that resulted through the contacts he made at Georgetown. “The great thing about the program although it’s set in one university…it’s so collaborative that we’re able to engage the writer with other universities and the wider community,” Frankland said. “I think it’s fantastic of” Montgomery College “to advise him. He’s a wonderful writer.”

Newland also just completed a screenplay for “The Scholar” and is in the process of talking to Film4 about getting sponsors.
“I have to tell you man, the script is banging! It’s better in terms of the story and the structure…. The message you get from the book in ’97 has become more urgent in 2007,” Newland said of London becoming more of a gun culture. Also,” if you read the book you won’t know what’s going on in the script. Some of the scenes are exactly the same, most of the scenes aren’t – especially the end.”

With his hands full at the moment, the attention of each project depends on their urgency for funding.
“Sometimes I’ll be like I know I can put” the novel “down for a little bit…I need to get the screenplay done because I want to get some funding for that,” Newland said. “It’s a financial thing a lot of the time…Not to say that drives me, but everyone’s got to eat.”