Overview

Starfish Blues is an experimental memoir of a Black queer woman's journey to find a version of home through tracing her family's migrations, reimagining environmental activism, and redefining her relationship to nature and place. Through a series of letters, poems, and nonlinear riffs through memory and time, Rasheena Fountain reflects on both the gifts and wounds of her formative experiences, including her childhood move from central Illinois back to Chicago's West Side; her daily life as a single parent; and her migration to Seattle to work in nature conservation, a field rife with discrimination, tokenism, and safety issues for BIPOC environmentalists and recreationists. Throughout, music is a restorative balm as well as a formal influence on Fountain's writing, which takes exuberant thematic and temporal leaps inspired by blues, gospel, and house music. Fountain examines her parents' and grandparents' stories and celebrates her family's history of movement, from the Great Migration to the legacy of Black explorers. In doing so, she reckons with broader systems of colonization and Indigenous erasure, as well as the insidious effects of enslavement, environmental degradation, police brutality, patriarchy, and homophobia. In this bold and lyrical debut, Fountain strives to transcend expectations of her sexuality and womanhood while seeking new ways to embrace her full self. Through healing the past and challenging the narratives that try to limit her, she searches for better versions of Black freedom. Intimate, insightful, and brimming with hope, Starfish Blues expands the possibilities of both memoir and nature writing, inspiring us to consider our own relationship to the places that have shaped us.

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9798234049803

Table of Contents

Reviews

""All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,"" writes Toni Morrison. Starfish Blues by Rasheena Fountain is a deep blue memoir written in the Black tradition of return. Shaped by the lands and waters of the Salish Sea, Mississippi, Chicago, and all that flows around and connects in between, Starfish Blues invites us to witness movement and is itself a witnessing. Our invitation to witness extends the possibility becoming ritual, rememory, and refrain. This refrain, steeped in the questions and answers of the blues, riffs on home. It is a book of relations in conversation with the living and dead, human and more than human, Black Spaces, Indigenous lands, past, present, and possible futures. It is a question of genre - poetry, prose, photographs - queer-mixing our lives. It is a love song to all Fountain's addresses in the book, but especially to Faith, Fountain's daughter, whose presence shines like the lightning bugs Fountain recalls briefly when returning to Mississippi one summer after the death of her great grandmother. However fraught our memories and imaginings must be, Starfish Blues sings us home."" -Rae Paris, author of The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory ""Starfish Blues is a vivid voyage through nature's provision set to a beautiful blues ballad of familial love. This brilliant epic of triumph brings laughter, nostalgia, and the warmth of a grandmother's embrace."" -Caprice Banks, author of Little Girl, Grown

Author Information

Rasheena Fountain centers environmental advocacy and justice. Her artist interviews, creative nonfiction, poetry, and essays have been published in ZORA, HuffPost, swamp pink, You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, Black Embodiments Studio Journal, Mountaineers Magazine, and more. She has received fellowships and support from the Jack Straw Writers Program, National Audubon, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her film, Dropped Down Blues, debuted in the ""How We Carry Water"" 2024 exhibit at PRAx. In 2025, she released, In the Aftermath, a blues guitar and poetry performance set. Fountain has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A.Ed. from Antioch University Seattle/IslandWood, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where she studies blues and environment as a PhD candidate in English.

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