Directory:Destiny Kinal

Destiny Kinal

Destiny Kinal has been a political creature since being radicalized by her marriage at 19 into the Handelman family. She attended the march for peace and civil rights in Washington DC with the Handelmans in August of 1963, hearing Martin Luther King Jr's I Have a Dream speech as well as a fiery oration by Malcolm X in a Baptist church that night.

There followed leadership in graduate school at Indiana University in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty as an organizer, and in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in programs to educate the population on the War in VietNam.

Destiny and her daugher Gilian Handelman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1967, after spending the summer at Ivan Ilych's Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernevaca Mexico. In San Francisco, she worked in the garment industry with Alvin Duskin and fell in with the anarchistic group The Diggers in Haight Ashbury.

After her marriage to Charles Gould, an activist in the Digger community, Destiny served as a political reporter during the Zero Growth years in Aspen Colorado in the 1970's. Together with two designer partners, Mollie Favour and Susan Logan, Destiny started a down vest company for children and for adults that did well until--undercapitalized--the company broke up.

Kinal's commitment to learn about the unholy alliance between the food industry and the chemical industries led her to work with Alberto Culver (Chicago) and Welch Foods (Westfield NY.) Years in New York City followed, during which Kinal worked at the leading edge of targeted marketing, designing subscription systems using complex multivariate analysis, to forrecast the consuming preferences and motivations of newer lifestyle born during and after WW II to Fortune 500 consumer goods companies, now known as multinationals.

KInal married Barry Skeist in 1985. The moved together to the Penn-York Valley. Years in local and regional community revitalization followed, working on the watershed organization Carantouan Greenway on the Susquehanna River that Kinal founded and directed. This experience, together with her years working in the foundation/funder world, have all contributed to Kinal's political sensibilities, which compel her to look for common threads of values and understanding in diverse populations.

A lifelong commitment to bioregionalism-- the core understanding that one's love of place, centered on the home watershed, its seasons and all the creatures and plants that define one's home uniquely--has defined Kinal's politics finally, more than any other philosophy or practice.

In 2010, KInal-with a loose confederacy of friends who have been defining and practicing bioregionalism for the past forty years--founded the Reinhabitory Institute and its imprint sitio tiempo press.

Kinal, who received her MFA from Bennington in 1998, completed the first book in the Textile Trilogy, Burning Silk, a literary novel of the new historical fiction persuasion, which was released in the summer of 2010 by sitio tiempo press. Kinal is at work on the second novel in the trilogy, Linen Shroud, expected to be released in 2013-14.

Kinal has two daughter, Gilian and Solange, each of whom have two children. She lives in two homes, one in Berkeley CA and the other in central NY south of Ithaca. Three of her four younger siblings are alive and well: Lance, Sean and Candace. Brian Kinal died in 2008 of cancer.