Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose : part one

Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose’s writing appears in The Atlantic, Rattle, Women Studies Quarterly, Feminist Formations, Room, and McSweeney’s, among many others. She is the author of two chapbooks, Wild Things (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Imago, Dei (winner of the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize), and the co-editor of two poetry chapbooks out of Foothills Press.  Her poem, “After My Teenager Tries…,” was one of 10 finalists out of 15,000 entries for the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her writing and scholarship focus on literary, mythological, and cultural representations of female identity and gender-based violence. She teaches courses in Creative Writing, Women in Literature, Women in Popular Culture, Female Iconicity, and Girls Studies in Rochester, NY, and was a recipient of the 2015 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2017 SUNY Traveling Lecturer Award. Co-founder of the four-woman collective Straw Mat Writers, she also facilitates a writing-as-therapy group for breast cancer survivors. Elizabeth lives in Rochester, NY, with her partner, Brian, their daughters Ava and Christina, and five unruly rescue animals. You can read more about her work at her website elizabethjohnstonambrose.com and find her on Twitter @libbyjohnston74.

What are you working on?

I have long been fascinated by female icons from literature and popular culture; increasingly, my academic interest in the ways myths about gender and sex are produced, circulated, and cemented has found its way into my poems. And because I am the daughter of two redheads, the daughter-in-law of a redhead, the eldest of four redheaded siblings, and the mother of two redheads, it’s no wonder that I have recently found myself drawn to literary and cultural representations of redheaded girls and women. 

The poetry collection that I’m working on (my first full-length!) meditates on the redhead as a cultural phenomenon, and, in particular, the redheaded girl/woman as a site of longing, fear, and fantasy. Why does Edward Munch imagine Sin as a redhaired woman? Why is the sexually promiscuous woman Gulliver encounters on the island of the Hounhyms a redhead?  How was Queen Elizabeth I's power (or imagined monstrosity?) connected to the color of her hair (the Scots referred to her as “the red hag”)?  What lies behind the Pre-Raphaelite impulse to imagine both the Virgin Mary and the prostitute Mary Magdalene as redheads?  

I also decided on a unique way of organizing the book. MC1R, which is the gene for redheads, maps to chromosome 16q24.3.  This means it is located on the long arm of chromosome 16, in position 24.3 Accordingly, my poetry book (which is still in its nascent stage) will contain 24 poems, split into three sections, with the 16th poem being the longest. Section one will focus on historic redheads from literature and popular culture, for example Orphan Annie, Lilith, Queen Elizabeth 1, Sylvia Plath, and The Little Mermaid. Section two will feature poems which each begin with an epigraph of a scientific “fact” (some examples: redheads have more sex; redheads feel less pain and require more anesthesia; redheads are conceived when a woman has sex on her period). The third section will be narrative poems based in my biographical experience. I have also created a new form based on this science called the MC1R form; a small portion of the poems in this collection will follow that form.