Linda Klibanow

I have often held to a truth that “I would have become an artist, if I could draw,…” and have reconciled myself to the compensatory notions that everything we do is art if we infuse with our notion of truth, some grace from above, and, of course, love. I have always believed in the dignity of work in all the manner in which work is done, street sweepers, dishwashers, nurses, or mediators. Meanwhile I have written miles of journals, stories, plays, poetry, and all manner of lists.

When, in and after 2005, I was fighting for my life against invasive ductal carcinoma, living in that chemo-induced “limbo land” between life and death, my perennially-favorite thing, “the word,” failed me and I found myself in collage, trying to express this experience and to find some strength and hope. In collage, the images, their interrelationships, and their message, cobbled from pieces of past lives and experience, cohere into their own form of combination in which secrets are both kept and revealed.

Klibanow was born and raised in New Rochelle, New York in 1950. In 1972 she received her degree cum laude from Harvard College (Radcliffe) in Russian history and literature and in 1975 her law degree from Yale Law School. She relocated to Southern California in 1976 where she has been practicing labor and employment law ever since, sequentially on the employer side, then the plaintiff/employee side, and for the past 20 or so years as an arbitrator and also mediator of such disputes.

Klibanow attributes her mediation skills in part to her “mixed” heritage, a “mischling” in German in reference to child of a non-Jewish mother (Scottish Presbyterian) and a Jewish father, also her “position” as the “middle” sister. Klibanow was raised without religion and it was not until 1976 when walking on the SoCal beach and joining hands in prayer with two proselytizing teenage girls that she accepted Christ, recognized him as the beloved fictional Aslan of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles and was baptized at the old Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul (no longer there), the Episcopal Church having just “broken” with the Anglican faith by endorsing the admission of women into the priesthood.

In October 1985 Klibanow’s dreams of motherhood came true with the birth of her daughter Natalie Jean who grew into an accomplished equestrienne as well as artist, having studied at Otis where she met her husband Andy Woll, a painter of some repute. Natalie’s half-sister Shayna studied at Otis as well and is married to Evan Drane who is working on his first HBO project.

Once both girls were grown, Klibanow cashed in a life insurance policy to attend the Tufts Fletcher School's "GMAP" program (2013-2015), gaining a masters degree in international affairs and a more informed understanding of so many things afflicting today's world, in particular, globalization menaces to living standards and our mother Earth, as well as the absence of true leadership.

Klibanow shortly will publish a collection of children's stories written in 2002, with illustrations by her daughter Natalie. In addition to conduct of "remote" hearings and mediations, Klibanow is now aspiring to her 7th grade goal of writing a novel which, as the novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (In The First Circle and Cancer Ward), while garnered in a tragicomic reality, yet convey an attainable optimism via lives lived true to each individual's God-given design.

In as many rare moments as possible, Linda nurtures her several gardens, whistles and dances with her parakeets, and adores her "rescue" dogs, Sylvie Renee, a Brittany Spaniel, and Margot Lin, a predominantly German Short-Haired mix. She also is in extremely rudimentary stage of learning the concertina. Klibanow lives with her loving husband and partner in crime Ken Peveler.

The pandemic has afforded her the opportunity for near total immersion in the so-called "Swedish death cleaning" process, making room, finally, for activities of imagination and expression.