Spotlight on Community Voices: Asphalt Experiences by Ondine LaSalle and frank kensaku saragosa
About Asphalt Experiences:
Ondine LaSalle, musician and writer, and frank kensaku saragosa, local writer and theater-maker, are long-time friends, and they have both experienced homelessness and unstable housing, but in very different ways. For this very special evening, Ondine and frank kensaku worked with Diversionary’s Wilfred Paloma to share their art stories and explore what being unhoused looks like from the perspective of people who have been there. LaSalle’s work will narrate her childhood and young adulthood living through housing instability, and the relationships she formed with others on the margins. saragosa’s work will spotlight his experiences as a queer man living unsheltered in downtown San Diego. Life on the margins. Stories people don’t expect. We are not telling the story of homelessness, we are sharing our stories to help create room for others to share theirs. Early development of saragosa’s work was supported by the generosityy of the William Male Foundation.
Content/ Trigger Warning: Frank depictions of homelessness, explicit references to drugs, drug use, especially intravenous use, references to sex work/ transactional sex, references to violence and suicidal ideation.
About the Artists:
frank kensaku saragosa is a queer San Diego based writer whose work is rooted in his experiences of homelessness, addiction, criminality and incarceration. He lost a lot of years on the streets and behind bars, so that’s what he writes about, because those years have to mean something, right? He has lived much of his life out of bounds, so he writes in experimental and hybrid forms because he figures why color inside the lines now? Work he wrote in prison won the PEN America Prison Writing Award, and since his release, he was named a LAMBDA Emerging Voices Fellow, an Anaphora Arts Fellow and won the Ragdale Foundation’s Wauld Fellowship for Formerly Incarcerated Artists. As a theater-maker, he was named a Columbia University Assembling Voices Fellow (with Jason Ritchie, as the San Diego Unhoused Collective), a Write it Out! Playwriting Fellow. and has been supported locally by the William Male Foundation. He has been anthologized in Emerge 2023, PEN Prison Writing Anthologies, and published in Foglifter, Exclamation Mark Literary Journal, Bicoastal Review, and GOAT pol and elsewhere.
Ondine LaSalle is a San Diego based singer songwriter and community artist. She was born and raised in the Bay Area, and she has been performing her original music in San Diego on and off over the last twenty years. She has performed with her band at venues all over San Diego including The Holding Company in Ocean Beach, Amplified Studios in Carlsbad, New Village Arts in Carlsbad, and The Garden Theatre Festival in Balboa Park. Ondine is the creator of Salon LaSalle, an artists’ salon featuring San Diego’s finest musicians and writers. Ondine got her start publishing and performing poetry as a young girl, and she is currently working on a memoir. She has lived experience with poverty, unstable housing, and homelessness. She lives in North County San Diego with her husband and two sons.