a conversation with Bri Gonzalez, author of A Wellness Check

queer poetics! bipolar poetics! Chicanx poetics! pop-culture poetics! so many exclamation marks!

Last fall, the wonderful Bri Gonzalez asked me to blurb their collection A Wellness Check. I was incredibly honored as a longtime Bri fan, but honestly I was also intimidated— I immediately fell in love with this expansive, genre- and genderfluid book! How could I fit all my thoughts in one small paragraph!

Luckily for me, and for the poetry world, A Wellness Check is out now from Game Over Books, and Bri Gonzalez is here for the next trans poetica author interview.

SG Huerta: To give folks reading this some context, we met each other over 4(!) years ago, when I started my MFA at Texas State. It’s been really amazing to see your writing evolve in that time and to grow alongside each other. I am beyond excited that your debut poetry collection is now out in the world! Could you talk a little bit about your writing journey so far?

Bri Gonzalez: Thank you, friend! Man, I miss our Texas State days! Shoutout to the University Writing Center. It was a lot of things, but it brought a great community together.

Since Texas State, I’ve received my MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder and been fortunate to attend a few wonderful writing workshops, including a fiction workshop with Abode Press. Reflecting on this question, I realized I’ve become quite the shapeshifter. I went into my MFA thinking I wanted to write ecopoetry, then abruptly moved into nectropastoral poetics, then sonic play, then eulogies. My journey so far is marked most by movement between subgenres and styles. It’s been fun to explore the adaptability of my work! And I often tell people, especially my MFA friends, that they don’t have to define themselves by a single subgenre. As creatives, we get to metamorphosize and be whatever we want.

SG: A Wellness Check is a hybrid collection that delves into the fluidity of genre and presentation on the page. How do you approach genreless writing? How do you know what form you want a particular piece to take?

Bri: I start by assessing how I want a piece to feel before thinking about the body it’ll inhabit. I never really know what form a piece will take before I write it. Instead, I let emotions lead the construction process and experiment until form and sensation are functioning symbiotically. Most of the pieces in my collection had many bodies before the final draft; I shapeshifted them over and over and over.

Some examples of form matching feeling: If I want a piece to radiate panic and anxiety, I might construct a prose poem with no syntax (also known as “Dual-Form Insanity (You’re Already Thinking, How Much More Is There to Say?” in the book). A light-hearted tone fits best in a poem where stanzas alternate number of lines to establish a comedic-like pacing (ex: tercets into quintets back into tercets). It just depends on the affect I’m searching for. Which maybe isn’t a helpful answer, but it’s true to my process.

The exception to this in A Wellness Check are the screenplays. Because I was riffing off of a franchise rife with cinematic content, I knew I wanted to pull from and play with scripts, specifically The Dark Knight’s. It would’ve felt like a missed opportunity not to! These hybrid poems became great homages and also encouraged (or forced?) the reader to be an active participant in the narrative.

SG: One of my favorite poems in the collection is “<¿>” (an earlier version can be found here). I’m interested in the creation process for this piece in particular.

Bri: “<¿>” is the second of its kind, following “Rogues Gallery.” When trying to translate madness, I wanted a form that mimicked erratic and/or paranoid mania, and how overwhelming that mental state is. I was obsessed with these repetitive stanzas—some echoing earlier points in the book—that overlapped one another, as if several people were chanting at once. Or maybe it’s a singular voice in the speaker’s head. But “<¿>” was added in the second draft. Given the genetic disposition of bipolar, a familial element felt absent in draft one.

My dad is undiagnosed, though I strongly believe he has bipolar. Which made me think about my tíos and tías and abuelos, if any of them have or had bipolar, what that means for them, if they even knew, or if any language about it was available to them. Conversations around mental illness in many Latinx or Chicanx families are net zero, out of survival, lack of resources, stigma, etc. I mean the odds are stacked against us institutionally, and then that bleeds into the home. Into belief.

So, a massive stew, here: which of my family members struggled with bipolar, if any? What does that mean for an immigrant family pressured to assimilate into American conventions for their safety? How does that change my conception of generational traits or traumas? I used these to kickstart my stanzas. They don’t provide answers by any means; my goal was to offer a response with emotional resonance or turmoil instead of resolution.

I knew I wanted this form because it captures so many of these frustrations while also representing ancestral voice. I’m a no sabo kid, and know basic Spanish, so I wrote what I could with my minimal understanding. It’s probably incorrect, but that’s okay (albeit terrifying to me). My hope is that my language insecurity became a conduit for psychological language access. In the final version, the poem has a footnote that starts with, “Don’t worry if you can’t understand this, neither can I.” This alludes to the speaker maybe also being no sabo, as well as struggling to understand their ancestry in general, and how it’s implicated in the psychiatric institution.

“<¿>” is layered (on more than one level), and in making it, I thought a lot about my family, whose struggles I may never have entry into. I wonder on what level my family and I know each other through the bond of diagnosis, without knowing it.

SG: Hearing you talking about the intersection of our shared culture and diagnosis feels incredibly important. This is such a fantastic answer that I’m going to sit with for awhile. On a similar note, we both often talk and write about our experiences with bipolar disorder. What does bipolar poetics mean to you?

Bri: For me, bipolar poetics means treasuring extremes. Maybe that’s in form, right? A poem that gradually cuts itself down, until all that’s left is a single-word stanza. Or, in looking at a collection, there could be a massive, cluttered poem following a sparser one. (An example here might be the aforementioned “Rogues Gallery” poem). But extremes can be expressed in language, image, tone. My goal is to replicate bipolar as I experience it on all levels of the page, and a huge facet is obviously the mood swings, and the black-and-white reactiveness that defines an episode. How can a poem hold space for the paralysis of depression? How can it also carry the god-complex of mania? How can any writing handle a mixed episode—the sporadic blend of both extremes at once? The closer I get to simulating bipolar in my writing, the closer I get to communicating my daily reality, which words often fail. 

I think these extremes define many fears and stigma, too. Movies and T.V. shows will say, “Watch out! They’ll violently lash out at any minute! Or say the wrong thing and they’ll have a suicidal breakdown!” Bipolar poetics is a chance to rewrite the narrative. And it’s powerful, taking ownership of the extremes, putting forth my own definitions of them. Appreciating them even at their worst. In that way, bipolar poetics is also showcasing beauty in disorder—not as opposites, but two co-existing parts of a complicated whole.

SG: A Wellness Check is set in the Batman-inspired world of Dr. Ratman. Could you share Dr. Ratman’s origin story?

Bri: Okay, picture this. It’s March 2, 2022. You’re at the early release of The Batman. Seriously great movie, revolutionary to the franchise. But, in the last act, there’s a scene between Riddler and Batman, set in Arkham Asylum. And the costume department put this crazy huge collar on Riddler for some reason? Look it up, I don’t know why they did that. But in this scene, it seems like Batman is trying to help Riddler, until the latter says something—I couldn’t tell you what—that sets off Batman’s rage. All the sudden he’s saying, “You’re going to die alone” and “You’re sick in the head.” The caped crusader totally shifts his response to someone he’s acknowledged is mentally ill.

Oh, and picture this all while being recently diagnosed. 

That scene instigated everything for me. The Batman franchise has been a huge part of my life for over a decade now. But at that premiere, popcorn in one hand, fresh diagnosis in the other, I understood its landscape from a radically new standpoint. When talking about the diagnosis experience, I tell people it’s like facing a doppelgänger. You see a strange version of yourself, and it doesn’t feel like you, not at first, but they have agency over you and what you do. Then you have to reconcile this and merge back into one being. So how does that translate to Batman’s notoriously mentally ill villains?

I spent a long time thinking about this scene. Then I ran through other Batman movies, T.V. shows, comics, video games, asking: who would I be in this world I love, knowing I’m disordered? How did I picture myself in it before? How did I envision these characters, as both interactive and solo entities, and how do I really fit in with them? I decided to distort Batman’s world, a place of comfort, to find answers. I felt I needed a space I understood deeply in order to investigate myself, my identity, and where they’re tangled with bipolar.

SG: Relatedly, what do you think pop culture can offer us as poets?

Bri: I love this question. I’ve met resistance about meshing pop culture with poetry. Poetry is a practice with many eras and traditions under its belt. I think sometimes the notion of pop culture doesn’t fit with tradition, or even that tradition doesn’t want to be broken, and that’s fair. Pop culture is seen as very “commercial.”

To me though, pop culture offers access. It sands down poetry’s intimidating edge and provides an entryway that everyday readers can walk through. It’s like finding a friend at a crowded event and being relieved to know someone in the room. I think it offers a wider audience and meets that audience with something familiar and approachable. 

I want anyone and everyone to read my book. And while the contents are intense, and maybe a poem’s meaning isn’t always overt, I hope pop culture is what guides readers through the text. 

SG: The title poem in your collection, “A Wellness Check,” is the crux of the collection for me, spanning 8 pages and several beautifully constructed stanzas. How do you go about writing long poems like this?

Bri: I actually wrote all the stanzas independent of one another! I was inspired by Lilly Hoang’s A Bestiary, an incredibly moving collection of essays. She uses what I call fragment essays, AKA an essay that may be two sentences long, one sentence, one word, etc. I wanted to try my hand at something similar. I pocketed away beginnings of smaller poems, bodies of longer poems that didn’t make the final cut, phrases I enjoyed, definitions, memories, dreams, and so on. Then I quilted my scraps together, thinking about how the parts worked in conjunction and if they could still stand on their own. My goal for this poem was to lay a lot of groundwork for the landscape and the speaker. I tried to think about it as puzzle pieces not yet connected. The context is there without diminishing each piece’s autonomy.

SG: Your titles in general are seriously brilliant. To name a few: “Yassified Salt Lamp,” “I’m Not Trying to be Much of a Person Right Now,” “Ratman Streams My Diagnosis on Netflix,” “There’s a Speech Bubble Over My Head Saying, “Twice as Ill, Twice as Dangerous!”” What role does the title of a poem play for you? 

Bri: My gut answer: it’s like my poetic version of a bouncy house. I just want to have fun. Maybe try to do a backflip. 

Besides fun, though, titles for me are like road signs preceding the journey of the poem. Something like “In Which I (Finally) Am Not Real” from my collection is a yield sign. It says wait, enter this one gradually. “Yassified Salt Lamp” is a 75mph sign straight out of a 45mph zone. And for this collection specifically, titles were tools to infuse absurdism and whimsy. Batman post-90’s is known for being gritty, dark, violent. Much of my book’s content matches that tone. But Batman in 1966? 1989? 1995? We’re talking neon colors, goofy line delivery, bad CGI, Jim Carrey in a bedazzled unitard. It felt imperative to braid in the playful, ridiculous elements of Batman too, and titles were perfect vessels for that. 

SG: I had the pleasure of joining you for a Halloween themed reading with Jessica Nirvana Ram, Bianca Alyssa Pérez, Diamond Gizelle Braxton, and Kristina Ten. Such a highlight of the fall season and beautiful show of community! What does community as a writer mean to you?

Bri: Thank you again for joining me at that reading! It was such a magical event. To me, community as a writer is finding ways to uplift each other where we can. Maybe we do a reading together or share links to one another’s work on socials. Maybe it’s simply an encouraging message during a time of doubt. Maybe we say “I’m thinking of you! How’s the work going?” Or maybe it’s something more behind-the-scenes like recommending each other’s books to students and colleagues. Exhaustion feels like a staple of life right now, and we don’t always have the energy (or spoons, as my therapist and I say) to show up on all of these levels. To me, giving what we can to each other—rallying for each other wherever we’re at capacity-wise—is community. It’s hard out here. We can’t face it alone. 

SG: Is there any media you’re inspired by lately?

Bri: Searows and Gigi Perez. Y’all. They’re like… a forest nymph and a siren respectively. Their lyricism and voices are so stunning and tender. I’m scheming several poems about them at the moment. I highly recommend “Funny” by Searows and “Please Be Rude” by Gigi Perez as starting points to their discographies. 

SG: What is next for you and your writing?

Bri: I’m currently working on a vampire novel! And I’m a decent way through—180 pages isn’t too shabby for a poet. I won’t say too much about it, but the story is set in 2018 San Marcos, TX. I’ve had a blast researching old haunts and digging through my Snapchat archive.

Other than that, I’ll be on the east coast in January for readings, times TBA. I plan on curling up with my cat this holiday season and working through my pile of unread books. 

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Bri Gonzalez is a queer, Chicanx writer from San Antonio, TX. They’re the author of A Wellness Check (Game Over Books 2024), a hybrid collection that puts prescription pads and glitter pens in the fists of Gotham’s Dark Knight. Bri received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder and currently teaches at Front Range Community College. They love horror movies, hot coffee, and their cat, Dahlia. Find more of Bri @ brimothee on Instagram, @ brigonzalez.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at bgwriting.org.

Order A Wellness Check here!

You can find past trans poetica interviews here! Feel free to get in touch if you want to collaborate in any way— QTPOC to the front always <3

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