About 100 years ago, the Oceano Dunes in south San Luis Obispo County was home to one of the Central Coast’s most famous and eclectic communities: the colony of artists, poets and mystics called the Dunites. But Central Coast residents may have never heard of a more obscure figure in that history, sometimes called the “godmother of the Dunites”: the Irish poet and mythologist Ella Young.
Young was born in Northern Ireland in 1867 and died in Oceano in 1956. She was an eccentric figure who dressed in purple robes, believed fairies and elves, and often claimed she talked with trees.
Linda Rosewood is one of the executive producers of Tulsk Productions, a group of Irish and American producers working on an audio drama exploring Young’s time in California.
“She inspires all kinds of people who are living a little bit counter-culturally,” Rosewood said.
Rosewood said she and her team at Tulsk Productions have a special connection to Young, her writings and her life story.
“I’m not going to say the spirit of Ella Young is guiding us, but she is the organizing principle of our fundraising,” Rosewood said.
Rosewood and some of her colleagues recently flew to California to do research in Oceano. She said it will help them make a case to potential funders and donors that there’s an audience for this story here in California.
“There's broad interest in this obscure woman who died in the 1950s who no one's ever heard of,” she said.
In the 1920’s, Young moved from Ireland to California, away from the violence in Dublin. After teaching Irish mythology and lore at UC Berkeley, she moved down the coast to Oceano. There, she got involved with the Temple of the People, the theosophical religious community in the nearby town of Halcyon.
Rosewood said she’s excited to share this story, called “Halcyon Days.” She said she hopes the funding lines up, because she believes people all over California will find it fascinating.
“We are connecting with people in all different parts of California culture who want to hear this story and want more people to know about her,” Rosewood said.
An hour-long drama takes a lot of time, work and money. There’s script-writing, voice acting, audio mixing and much more. So, Tulsk Productions is looking for private and public donations through the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco to make Halcyon Days happen.
Tony Phillips is one of Tulsk Productions’ executive producers. He said Young represents the pride that Irish people like himself have in their ancient Celtic roots.
“We were always those who were taken over in a colonial sense. We are those who are colonized, not the colonizers," Phillips said. "When Ella Young was working with those myths, she had to translate them into English because most of the population at that time didn't even speak Gaelic."
"They couldn't even understand their own myths in their own language, because all they spoke was English,” he said.
Phillips said Young’s anti-colonial legacy doesn’t just matter to Irish people — he feels it’s relevant to historically-oppressed people all across the United States, who Young felt a special kinship with.
“A lot of the North American continent and Ireland have something in common, and that's being colonized. We were the ones who lost our languages. We were the ones who were almost wiped out,” he said.
Halcyon Days would be Tulsk Productions’ second audio drama in a two-part series. The first, called "The Morrigan," follows Young’s life as a poet and Celtic mythologist during the Irish nationalist movement in the early 1900’s — one of many attempts to gain independence from the British.
Halcyon Days would then follow Young's life as she became close with an American writer and astrologist named Gavin Arthur. Young would become his inspiration for later founding the Dunites community and naming it “Moy Mell,” which means “pastures of honey” in Gaelic.
The Tulsk Productions team hopes they’ll get the funding they need to have Halcyon Days released within a few years. More information is available here.
The KCBX Arts Beat is made possible by a grant from the Shanbrom Family Foundation.
