About the Press

ABOUT THE PRESS

Tendre Press was born on December 16, 2006, at 9:00 p.m. in Bloomington, Indiana to publish “interdimensional books that provoke the mind, open the heart, and invoke the soul.” This Vast Being is the first, and perhaps will be Ann Kreilkamp’s only, printed book. Since that time, the culture’s focus on printed books has shrunk, while widening to include a larger (and less expensive) focus on “media.” Thus the change in the subtitle above.

“Media” includes Videos and Audios, Essays and E-Books (often collections of essays), all in an enormous Archive of her written works for the public, published and unpublished, beginning with her unusual and controversial Ph.D. dissertation in Philosophy at Boston University in 1972 and moving forward, almost 50 years of nearly continuous self-expression. “I cannot help myself. It’s the main thrust of what I do, on this good earth, and at this critical time in human history.” Ann is here to alchemically witness, process, and share — her own living experience, as an illustration of how one embodied soul gathers/creates meaning through space and time and learns to appreciate the gradually revealed thrust of her singular life.

The name, “Tendre Press,” came as an extended spin off in meditation with two women who helped birth the book: Jiang-Mei Wu, the designer, and Julia Jackson, the production manager. First, they picked up the image of a “spiral,” or “spiraling”—in the invisible realms, as the way energy expands and grows, to link dimensions with one another. “Spiral” then led them to “tendril” in the visible, natural world—such as how ferns uncoil from the center out.

Think of the word “tend”—to stretch or stretch out, to hold forth, offer, from the French verb “tendere”—to aim, stretch, extend. And, since 1542, also as a verb, “tendre”—to offer formally; thus money, as “legal tender.”

The French “tendre,” as well as the English “tender” both mean “soft, easily injured, delicate, kind, loving, affectionate, as in “tender-hearted.”

Tendre Press aims to mentally and spiritually embrace the paradox between the harshness often encountered in the world of legal tender and the softness of our tender hearts. We reach out, extend our hand affectionately with media of fine quality in both design and content.

Tendre Press intends to —

  • provoke the mind to pierce through our usual distractions with things that don’t matter;
  • open our hearts to the love that surrounds and permeates our beings;
  • invoke the individual and collective soul, that we may realize our oneness.

 

3d book display image of This Vast Being

Looking for a Great Book to Read? Look No Further!

This book invites the reader into the rich inner journey of a woman whose husband died of a heart attack and left her, bereft and alone, in a brand new town. Unlike many who suffer sudden, unimaginable loss, Kreilkamp, 60, did not fall into depression. She describes, in detail, her “year of conscious grieving” during which she formally attended to new widowhood as a precious and short-lived mine of information and inner expansion. Interweaving the many dimensions—visible and invisible, literal and spiritual—to which she was privy during the initial stages of her mourning process, she shares both poignant remembrances and the shocking transformations that moved her and moved through her like squalls. This Vast Being plunges the reader into the dynamics of a difficult marriage that gradually evolved into a union of equals and opened both their hearts. And it reveals the complex inner reality of Jeffrey Joel, a mostly submerged Renaissance Man who, post-death, presented unusual phenomena to demonstrate his existence in a realm that she sensed only a hair-breath from ours; who continued to impart his wisdom after he died and, to her surprise and delight, who invited her into a deeper intimacy than he could afford while embodied. Finally, This Vast Being invites the reader into certain interior spaces of which most of us are not normally aware, and to explore them. As we open to this vast being inside us, we access an expansive awareness that transforms what appears as irreplaceable loss into a magnificent cache of hidden significance. In so doing, this book creates a down-to-earth and unusually inclusive template for human healing.

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