Author's Message

Helen Bee

Born in 1939 in Tacoma, Washington, I grew up in the beautiful Pacific Northwest and have had a life-long love of the mountains and forests of that area. No matter where my professional or personal life has taken me, I have spent as many weeks as possible every summer on Orcas Island, in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle, where my heart lives, even if my body is elsewhere.

After college at Radcliffe and then graduate school at Stanford, my first faculty job was at Clark University in Worcester, MA. After two years there, I was offered a job at the University of Washington and jumped at the chance to go back to my beloved Northwest. My early faculty years at the UW coincided with the upheaval of the Vietnam War protests - a difficult time to be a faculty member anywhere, made more difficult in my case because I had been appointed to a university-level faculty governance committee and spent many hours helping to decide how the University should respond to various protests. At the end of that time, I took a year's sabbatical to travel around the world by myself, and returned to the UW convinced that the life of a professor was not the one I wanted for the remainder of my years. I resigned my tenured position and left the University.

I did not, however, renounce my profession as a psychologist. I took several part time research positions, worked as a consultant, and - best of all - wrote my first textbook, at the urging of a publisher's representative. I couldn't have made a better choice. In the 25-plus years since that time, I have not only enjoyed working for myself, I have taken great pleasure in the challenge of remaining current and thoughtful about a rapidly changing field.