I dedicated my first two books to organizations and women that many people know. The Star is dedicated to a woman very few people know. You can't even find Dorothea Romankiw by searching in Google. And yet, for dozens of us, she altered our lives completely. She died in her eighties in July of 2006.
In 1964 she began a treatment center for schizophrenic adolescents based on the work of Carl Jung called St. George Homes. It was located in Victorian homes scattered around north Berkeley. She was brilliant, impossible, unpredictable, compassionate, and rarely satisfied. But she woke up the staff, and some of the kids, to a magical, mystical world of myth and beauty that permeates what we call ordinary reality. Jungians study the collective unconscious. At St. George's we lived it. In tepees on the desert floor, in sweat lodges under redwoods, in candlelight beside a frozen lake, or dressed in robes and ornate masks in the hills of Berkeley, one hundred and fifty staff and forty-five schizophrenic teenagers encountered the healing power of the collective unconscious. One young patient said it best: "In other institutions people watched me go down into the crazy places. You went down there with me, by my side. Then we came out together."
It is because of her that Warren knows these dark corners of the psyche. He, and I, bow low in honor of your memory, Dorothea.