Starfish Blues: A Memoir

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.