Edith Vonnegut has exhibited her work in various galleries and museums throughout the United States since the late 1970's.  She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

"The images of women should be infused with more vigor, strength, and participation.  We need powerful allegories. We never just sat around....  Why haven't  we been shown (in art) with more vitality and grandeur?  Why are women so often relegated to the backgound, helplessly waiting while someone else slays the dragon?  We slay dragons all of the time."

Dorothy Strauss was an English teacher at a New York City High School for many years. She came to Cape Cod where she is now a well-known local artist. Crescendo is her first novel.

Life was good for Ben and Norma, a golden couple who loved their professions, their friends, their leisure and each other.  Each one compromised one major need before having married.  Fourteen years of her life were close to idyllic until a need stirs in Norma that dramatically threatens their relationship.  Now she is thrown like flotsam and jetsam into a roiling turbulent sea during one summer's vacation on Cape Cod Her journey of self-discovery eventually leads her to make an agonizing choice.