Louise Penny comments instructively that in order to write about the darker emotions – jealousy, rage, loneliness – she has to examine her own experience of them.

“There’s no hiding from emotions,” was her remark, “you have to be brutally honest to give your characters depth.”

The literary critic in The Globe and Mail rewards Ms. Penny’s insight with the note, “her complex plot owes more to human emotion and psychology than to clockwork timing.” In fact, all the critiques that I read applaud the fluidity and veracity of her characters. They praise her books for the story telling and intimate look into the lives of people about whom she is writing.

This year, benefitting from a wondrous growth spurt, last year’s “One Book One Community”, sponsored by BookLore and Orangeville Public Library, blossomed into “One Book One County” to include the whole of Dufferin. The CEO’s of both Shelburne Public Library and Grand Valley Public Library wanted to join in the fun.

This initial year, the One Book One County was awarded to Ms.. Penny’s crime fiction, “The Brutal Telling,” the fifth in her series about Inspector Armand Gamache, set in the fictional Quebec village of Three Pines. The Brutal Telling has just been awarded the prestigious American Crime Writers’ Agatha Award (literary awards for mystery and crime writers who write via the same method as Agatha Christi) and was on the New York Times best seller list for three weeks.

Ms. Penny and I managed to spend a little while chatting on the telephone at the end of her writing day earlier this week. She is in the first edit of her next book, which she says she “simply “simply adores.” The first edit, she explained, is “major” while the fifth edit is just “grace notes.” The new book, Bury Y o u r Dead, has required considera ble research for it concerns itself with a historical element of Quebec SPORTS City: whatever happened to the body of Champlain, the founder of Quebec City?

We discussed the work and ethics of writing.

“Writing is fun,” she admitted, “but it is also hard work. It is discipline – you have to stay in touch with your darker side. My books are not about murder [although there is always a murder to begin] but about what happens to people when their world falls apart. I show where evil exists so does goodness.”

For some years, Ms. Penny was a journalist and CBC radio host, dealing primarily with hard news and current affairs, working in Toronto, and then Thunder Bay. Moving to Winnipeg gave her the chance to do docu- men- taries and host an aftern oon show. Restless, she shifted to Quebec, where she was host on the morning show, getting up at 4:00 in the morning every day to do so.

In her mid-thirties, as she tells it herself, “the most remarkable thing happened. [She] fell in love with Michael, the head of haematology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.”

Michael was a widower of about four years and still grieving, and Ms. Penny was deciding to change her life by leaving the CBC. They were both in difficult times.

She realised, as she put it, that working for the CBC, “demanded a skill set that wasn’t a complete fit. You need a team leader and I was becoming jaded and cynical.”

Michael told her, “If you want to write, I’ll support you.” For Ms. Penny, this was both “unexpected and very beautiful. Over the years, we are routinely aware of this great gift [of our marriage] and never take each other for granted.”

So, she began to write her first book and ran right into writer’s block for a long time, which “was fear.”

“The writing needs to be its own reward,” she said thoughtfully. “It needs to be reward enough – you have to believe in yourself -it’s heartbreaking.”

Once it was finally finished, it took her two years to find someone to be interested in her book. This break came along because she was short-listed in a literary competition in the U.K.

Having done so well since that first publication and commanded such a string of accolades – others of her series have also received the Agatha Award – she and Michael established a similar competition for best unpublished writers here with the Crime Writers of Canada.

“There are some really talented writers but publishers are so inundated with manuscripts, sometimes they reject them without even reading them because they don’t like the covers. So, it is very hard for debut novel to rise above the ocean. I always encourage writers to persevere and to look out for competitions. You have to believe in yourself.

So, Ms.. Penny is coming to Dufferin County, to Grace Tipling Hall in Shelburne next Sunday, June 6 at 2:30 p.m. to give a talk about The Brutal Telling.

“It is a great honour for my book to win the One Book One County,” Ms. Penny declared. She has been here in Orangeville before and “can hardly wait” to return.

She enthused about the people here: “They are a really dynamic and passionate group of people.” And for Nancy Frater, she has considerable praise: “Nancy is an agenda setter in Canada – she’s done such a lot of good.”

Something Ms. Penny always keeps in mind: that writing is such a privilege. She knows how lucky she is to be able to earn her livelihood writing. She approaches her career as a writer with a profound sense of gratitude.