Highland County Author Paul Klein Publishes A New Book Of Essays

Headwaters, VA – Highland County author Paul Klein has just published a new book of essays called Mixed Freight – Checking Life’s Baggage. Mr. Klein is a resident of Headwaters and has worked with the Highland County Volunteer Rescue Squad for many years. He started in radio and film-making back in the 1950’s and has many interesting projects to his credit, including working on films for President Kennedy’s staff in the early 1960’s. Mr. Klein describes some of his early film-making.

“I began writing for film back in the middle 1950’s” says Klein “as an employee of a production company that was located in Washington, D.C. We were at that time involved in a television series, early syndicated documentary series about American labor and American industry – the series was called “Americans at Work.”

Mr. Klein goes on to relate an early encounter he had with acclaimed Highland County author Donald McCaig.

“Finally when I retired in the spring of ’92, we moved down here [to Highland County] full time” he says. “I remember meeting Don McCaig one day a the Frontier Museum; there had been an article about me in the Recorder [newspaper] primarily about the house we were building, but somewhere in that interview the writer had noted that I was a writer and that I planned to devote myself to writing once I cleared the decks a bit. Don said, what are you going to write and I said I really don’t know yet, but it’s going to be for me. So all these years I’ve been writing for other people and now I want to write what I want to write.”

Mr. Klein talks about how his essays developed into an interest in writing fiction.

“This new book is the result of some of that early writing that I began to do here” says Klein. “A lot of the essays that are in this book appeared first in the Recorder. Then I put those aside [and] began working at fiction writing, and I discovered that’s the real writing. It’s great to take and idea and play with it and write what you think about it; write an essay about it. Fiction writing involves taking a thought, an idea and building a story around it.”

Mr. Klein concludes with a description of his new book

“This book is a collection of essays” he says “all my thinking about a whole lot of different subjects; politics and economics and society in general; about me and about what I believe and what I think is right and true.”

Both of Paul Klein’s books, his collection of essays called Mixed Freight – Checking Life’s Baggage and his novel, Accidents of Time and Place are available in Monterey at the Gallery of Mountain Secrets.