Dr Robert Francis

R.M. Francis is a Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing. He's published five poetry pamphlet collections. Bella, his debut novel, was published by Wuild Pressed Books in March 2020, and his poetry collection, Subsidence is due out with Smokestack Books in December 2020. he completed his undergraduate degree in English Literature at  University of Portsmouth, and received distinction in his MA Creative Writing at Teeside University. He was awarded a bursary to complete his PhD at University of Wolverhampton for a project titled Queering the Black Country. His thesis explored Black Country fiction and the connections - in theory and practice- between the post-industrial liminality of the region and queer identity. Using Psychogeography and Environmental Psychology the project illustrates how one's culture, heritage and environment help form communal identity and sense of place. It examines sense of place in the region's literature and investigates the liminal aspects of its geography and socio-politics; exposing how liminal places affect the inhabiting cultures and communities. In 2019 R.M. Francis was the inaugural David Bradhaw Writer in Residence at Oxford University.

Chain Coral Chorus

Chain Coral Chorus is a creative writing research project that explores the Black Country Geopark; seeking to produce a series of place-specific poems based on the 45+ geosites, recognised by the Black Country Geopark initiative, in conjunction with Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton Councils. My project will support and celebrate the bid for the geopark to gain UNESCO Global Geopark status, as spaces of special scientific and environmental interest. 

The Black Country is famous for its role in the Industrial Revolution; it's industrial heritage forged unique and important communities and cultures; this, in many ways was connected to the grounds that gave life to these cultures - the fossil rich grounds dating back  to the Silurian era. This creative work will re-figure our relationship with the local environment; both in its surfaces and depths, the building materials and the forces that create them. This project will consider these issues in an overlooked region, famed for its 'Dark Satanic Mills' in the Industrial Revolution, considering this in conjunction with conservation, ecology, sustainability and new ways of experiencing place in the anthropocene.

Chain Coral Chorus will be the first Black Country Geopoetry project. Geopoetics are  variety of experimental writing practices that draw on geological method and language, and consider human life, culture and society in a deep time context. Don McKay referred to it as ' the place where materialism and mysticism, those ancient enemies, finally come together, have a conversation in which each hearkens to the other, then go out for a drink'. In this way, the poets notebook and the geologists field journal fuse.  

I'll be working in close conjunction with The Black Country Geological Society and The Lapworth Museum to engage the public in these new ways of considering poetry and place. This will culminate in a sequence of Black Country Geopoems, a critical study of my geopoetics in relation to the region, and a series of walks, talks, readings and workshops.