Call Your Grandmother Rocko Foltz

Ana Anu

Ana Anu’s Call Your Grandmother is the culmination of their poetics surrounding the vital wisdom of elder women. As a fellow scholar of creative writing and poetics at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School, I have seen Anu’s development of their forthcoming book Crone-Ology as a simultaneous development of their personal work with and for elder women. The ethos of Anu’s work is clear: In the face of near constant atrocity and subsequent disillusionment with our governments and other systems of power and knowledge, turn to crones.

Image by Amanda Tipton Photography | FB- Amanda Tipton-Photographer | IG – @amandatiptonphotography

For Anu, this ethos has translated into a deep personal investment in communities of women. Water Bend, Anu’s short film on display in Call Your Grandmother, exemplifies their personal commitment to amplifying the voices and embodied wisdom of women and the natural world. The film features a series of women and queer femmes engaging with a river; writing poetry on the water’s surface, reciting poems to the river, floating, and so on.

Image by Amanda Tipton Photography | FB- Amanda Tipton-Photographer | IG – @amandatiptonphotography

Paired with Anu’s poetry read over the collection of river scenes, a relationship between water as a source of wisdom, women, and lineage emerges. Call Your Grandmother is a deep exploration of this relationship, bridging seamlessly Anu’s poetics and material practice with natural materials such as plants and flowers as well as their urgent personal and artistic ethos of magnifying the narratives, voices, and wisdom of crones. 

Rocko Foltz is a writer from Cleveland, OH. They are currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Poetics at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Rocko’s work can be found in Dream Pop Journal and J Journal.