Jessica Star Rockers finds the limelight at Pegasus.

If you’ve been christened Jessica Star Rockers, you’re probably going to pick up a guitar at some point in your life just to see what happens.

But for the unlikely-named island singer-songwriter, music was not so much preordained as a convenient fallback, only pursued after grand literary aspirations waned.

“I wanted to be a famous writer, but it didn’t work out,” said Rockers, who at 28 is probably a bit too young to rule out much of anything. She nevertheless follows her new muse to Pegasus Coffee House, appearing at 7:30 p.m. this evening.

Rockers – who actually is more closely aligned with folkies – is promoting her first album, the self-produced “Beloved On Earth,” now available through various online sources.

A self-described “blue collar princess,” Rockers grew up in Roscoe, Ill., an hour or so outside of Chicago. She came by her name innocently enough; Star was chosen for Native American connotations, while the surname Rockers was handed down through German ancestry.

Whether taken together they reflect her “hippie farmer” mother’s taste in music at the time of Jessica’s birth, that’s a question not necessarily resolved.

“My mom swears there were no rock stars in 1978,” Rockers said, “but I’m pretty sure there were.”

She earned a degree in creative writing at Beloit College in Wisconsin; post-graduate studies in literary editing and design took her to Eastern Washington University.

Drawn to the Northwest in part by the flannel-shirted grunge rock scene she’d enjoyed from afar as a teenager in the 1990s, she was surprised to find the university somewhat removed from Seattle both in geography and culture.

“When I looked at the map,” she said, “they seemed a lot closer.”

After completing her studies, aspiring writer and publisher Rockers founded a literary magazine called “Strange Fruit.” The moniker came from the haunting, pre-civil rights anthem popularized by Billie Holiday in 1939: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.”

Rockers recalls the first moment she realized the lyrical imagery referred to the victims of southern lynching, inspiring anew her faith that the well-chosen word could move readers and listeners.

“That moment was so powerful,” she said. “That’s the stuff I wanted to publish.”

Three issues of Carver-esque short stories, essays and poems were produced, and friends helped distribute the magazine around the country. But Rockers ran into the inescapable reality of the publishing world: it costs a lot to publish.

“You get a lot of people submitting,” she said, “but not a lot of people supporting it financially.”

Equally frustrated by her own writing, she turned to a familiar and ready outlet in music.

Rockers had sung in her church choir as a youth, and was a lifelong fan of movie musicals and the notion that the world might someday just stop what it was doing and break out into song and dance around her.

An interest in more contemporary popular forms came in her teen years, thanks to an older cousin who left a trove of ‘70s vinyl in the family basement. Young Rockers mined the record collection for exposure to a range of sounds, from English blues-rock acts like Cream and Foghat to such folk luminaries as Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkle.

There followed private, transformative adolescent scenes straight out of “Almost Famous.”

“I would listen to “I Am A Rock” in my room,” she said, “and feel like they understood me.”

Having taken up the guitar in college, Rockers returned to the instrument and found that it suited her new aspirations even as advances in technology put recording easily within her grasp.

Her debut album, “Beloved On Earth,” was recorded on her home computer over a six-month period and completed earlier this year.

The nine songs – seven originals, a Johnny Cash cover and world-weary reading of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” – sit cross-legged between yesterday’s folk and today’s indie rock, all plaintive strums and contemplative musings awash in cavernous reverb.

Lyrically, Rockers’ quotidian concerns center around “I” and “you,” even when “you” happens to be a place or a thing instead of a person.

Her songwriting routine: “Stuff comes out, and I try to make it worth singing again.”

The live act is still sorting itself out. Early ventures onto the stage in Seattle clubs met with a mixed response.

“I didn’t do very well – I got heckled a lot,” she said. “So I just do coffee shops now. I think folk singers and bars are not always a good mix.”

Rockers and her husband moved to the Fletcher Bay neighborhood from Seattle earlier this year.

When not working on her own repertoire, she also brings a bit of an “indie” edge to the Bainbridge Chorale.

“I don’t know if I’m the only person in the chorale with a tattoo, but I think the percentage is small,” she said. “Small to maybe one.”

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Future star rocker

Island singer/songwriter Jessica Star Rockers performs at 7:30 p.m. tonight at Pegasus Coffee House. Her debut album “Beloved On Earth” is available through iTunes and www.cdbaby.com, and more information is availble at www.myspace.com/starrockers.