About the Press

Tendre Press was born on December 16, 2006 at 8:48 p.m. in Bloomington, Indiana to publish “interdimensional books that provoke the mind, open the heart, and invoke the soul.” Ann Kreilkamp’s This Vast Being is our first book. We plan to publish more of her work as well as that of others, and to begin, we will consider manuscripts from women who have written their spiritual autobiographies.

The name “Tendre” came to us (Julia Jackson, Jiangmei Wu and
Ann Kreilkamp) in meditation, as an extended spin-off. 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. 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 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 to you with books of fine quality in both design and content.

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