Buy: A Wellness Check by Bri Gonzalez | Game Over Books | September 2024 | $18
What are some key themes present in your book?
A Wellness Check (Game Over Books, 2024) largely investigates and criticizes pop culture’s
violent perspectives on clinical illness. It does so by parodying Batman, shapeshifting him into
Dr. Ratman, who’s a conduit for typical superhero heroism and the psychiatric institution as a
whole. Diagnosis, medication management, and madness are what keeps the book’s heart
beating.
The collection also explores queerness, community, identity loss, and wellness culture (or
capitalism’s grimy claws hooked into the idea of “wellness”). Familial tension weaves through
the narrative as well, specifically tensions in Chicanx and immigrant families regarding mental
health beliefs.
Can you talk about your use of form and theory?
My book is what I like to call “a maximalist mess,” though its real label—a hybrid poetry
collection—lends itself to stronger marketing. A Wellness Check includes poems, prose, fragment
essays, visual poems, screenplays, collages, and some fun entities with a little bit of everything
in it. So, formally speaking, the collection ping-pongs all over the place.
My goal was to encapsulate my experience with bipolar on the page. Since the feeling of
“craziness”—or even the fear of being “crazy”—often defies words, I knew the work’s form and
sonic texture needed to do some heavy lifting regarding affect and mood. But how can form and
sound consume emotion? How can they spit back out the jittery, overwhelming force of anxiety?
How can they project stress onto the reader? Or even mirror the act of retrospective processing? I
really wanted to consider how a poem’s frame could embody sensation and to what extent.
I think the most successful results are my mania poems. And I don’t mean pretty, bubbly, social
hypomania, but mania fueled by irritation, aggression, delusion. I used prose poems with
repetitive lines and zero syntax to simulate erraticism and paranoia. Several visual poems in the
collection consist of layered text, mimicking harmful or self-depreciative thoughts. Sonic play
was vital as well. In those same cluttered, syntax-less prose poems, I employed sharp consonants,
tight vowels, cacophonous words—when squeezed together in a repetitive, fast-paced poem, the
sound elicits a particular tension. For example, in my poem “Dual Form Insanity (You’re
Already Thinking, How Much More is There to Say?” the first few lines read:
once upon a time there was a once upon a time once upon a once time there
upon a brain chose to be full of maggots once maggots chose to be a colony
of hands upon sulci gyri play-doh reorganized synapse time…
Now try reading that in one breath, as quickly as you can.
My hope is that the poem gives agency to panic and fear. When our thoughts are circling down
the drain endlessly, crashing over each other. And these mania poems lack direct meaning; my
aim was to replicate emotion and funnel that through each poem’s construction instead of
focusing on comprehensible language.
How did writing this book transform you?
I wrote this book less than six months post-bipolar-diagnosis. At the time, I was starting three
medications, shedding a fourth one, undergoing intense side-effects, and began blood testing for
lithium treatments (when left unchecked, lithium can cause short-term toxicity or long-term
damage to the kidneys and thyroids, so lithium users are blood-tested monthly). I was also in my
second semester of my MFA, two states away from home. I was renegotiating a lot of
relationships with people who didn’t believe in my diagnosis, or the effectiveness of medication.
It was tough, advocating for myself while processing this new, jarring information.
A Wellness Check was my safe space. I could crawl into my manuscript with its heroes and rats,
and in that space, I could figure out my diagnosis—and figure out myself—as I wished. That’s
where I reconciled my perceived self with my diagnosed self. This book transformed me through
play, sound, experiment. Even now, two years after the first draft, it forces me to say “I’m
bipolar” at least five times a month. And each time, I say it with more pride than the last.
What’s your favorite line(s) from your book?
“Sometimes I know exactly what gods feel like and it’s not sacred or glorious or holy.”
“I split until my body // shattered flesh-kissed piles of death.”
“the center / of you, at the root of mania, / the meteor-showering of yourself.”
“THE DOCTOR IS RATMAN, BROODING. AS YOU ANSWER THE FORM’S DEMANDS,
YOUR FINGERS HARDEN INTO STICKS OF REDBLUEYELLOW DULLED CHALK
THAT RASP FINE DUST, SKETCHING HOUSES ON DR. RATMAN’S CHEST.”
Community and friendship are sustaining factors for many writers. Give a shoutout
to some of the folks who have held and supported you in your writing life.
MASSIVE GRATITUDE TO: my #1 Anjali, Diamond Braxton, SG Huerta, Jessica Q. Stark,
Giovanna Lomanto, my sister Marisa, my Texas crew, Morgan J. Sammut, Kristina Ten, Frank
Allison, Rajiv Mohabir, Jessica Nirvana Ram, Cavar, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Marisa Tirado, Josh
Savory and all of the GoB team, and so, so many more.
Community drives everything. I’m thankful to be uplifted by such beautiful people.
Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it?
I’m currently working on a vampire novel. All I’ll say is this: a queer, Chicano vampire haunts Texas State in 2018. Go cats, go!
Bri Gonzalez is a queer, Chicane writer from San Antonio, TX. Their debut collection, A
Wellness Check (Game Over Books, 2024), puts glitter pens and prescription pads into the fists
of Gotham’s Dark Knight. More of Bri’s work can be found in Four Way Review, Cuéntame
Literary Magazine, Honey Literary, Full Stop, and more. In their free time, Bri enjoys hyper-
fixating on toxic characters and bothering their cat, Dahlia. Check Bri out at bgwriting.org or
@brimothee on Instagram.