Tendre Press was born on December 16, 2006, at 9:00 p.m. in Bloomington, Indiana, during a rare, extremely potent five planet stellium in the philosophical sign of Sagittarius: Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Sun and Pluto — with a lofty mission: to publish “interdimensional books that provoke the mind, open the heart, and invoke the soul. ”
Five planet stellium, in the 5th house of personal creative expression: two potent conjunctions, one with three planets, the other with two. Jupiter (5°), Mars (7°), Mercury (13°): expansive, passionate communication; Sun (24°), Pluto (26°): penetrating illumination.
The second conjunction conjuncts my own December 19 birthday.
All buttressed by deep, unwavering, profound (13°) Scorpio Moon in the 4th house of the home.
My first book, This Vast Being, will likely, however, be my only one. Since that time, our culture’s focus on printed books has shrunk, while simultaneously evanescing into an expanding focus on proliferating “media,” including e-books and blogposts.
I morphed into a near-daily blogger in January 2012, first with exopermaculture.com (still available as an archive), and since August, 2021, with annkreilkamp.net.
It is now 2025. Nearly 20 years have passed — in a blink! At this point, given my advanced age, 82, I have decided to turn this website into an archive, to include as many of my decades of essays, e-books, videos and audios as I deem worthy in the unknown time I have remaining.
Part of me wonders why I bother. After all, the world moves so swiftly now, the past disappearing into a fog; meanwhile, “media” threatens to turn us all into bots.
A larger part of me realizes that what I bring to the world may continue to be of value for those who seek to get back in touch with their own embodied life, and to gather and create meaning from their own very personal experiences. My work is unusual, in that I dwell consistently on philosophical and cultural themes while writing from my own nitty-gritty experience. My forté is first person writing with a widening perspective. Abstract/concrete; above/below; within/without: I embrace the paradox of the opposites, recognizing that “the edge is where the action is.” i.e., the dynamic center between opposites IS the nexus of aliveness, and thus, continuous growth.
Besides the book, “Media” to include Videos and Audios, Essays and E-Books (collections of essays, with intro material), published and unpublished, beginning with my unusual and controversial Ph.D. dissertation in Philosophy at Boston University in 1972 and moving forward, over half a century of nearly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. I remain on this planet to alchemically witness, process, and share — my 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, we 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 us 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. The French “tendre,” as well as the English “tender” both mean “soft, easily injured, delicate, kind, loving, affectionate, as in “tender-hearted.” Tendre Press exists to —
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“Ann, explorer and witness to psychic, synchronistic, astrological and psychological links between inner psyche, outer reality and invisible realms, portrays a marriage that continued after death to encompass these realms and their differences. A remarkable narrative.”
— Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Jungian analyst, well-known author and speaker.
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.
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.
Finally, This Vast Being gathers journal writings from the first year after my husband Jeff died into book chapters that hopefully, may assist, console, and even illuminate others who are undergoing the profound inner process that accompanies the death of a loved one.
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