Claudia Dey on How To Be a (Lucky) Bush Pilot

Claudia Dey's new book, How To Be a Bush Pilot, is not really about flying planes. It's a field guide to getting luckier. Or more specifically, it's a sex guide for straight men.

It may seem like a departure of sorts for Dey, who is an accomplished novelist and playwright. Her first novel, Stunt, was named one of the top books of the year by both the Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire and was a finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her plays, including The Gwendolyn Poems and Trout Stanley, have been produced internationally.

The poet, playwright and novelist is, however, no stranger to writing about what goes on in the bedrooms of the country. Dey began writing about sex for Toro magazine in 2004 (under the pseudonym Bebe O'Shea), and currently has a column on the same subject in the Globe and Mail.

How to Be a Bush Pilot takes the inspiration behind those columns and turns it into a five-part book. From anatomy to seduction and safer sex, Dey covers all the bases with good-natured humour and tact.

"I wanted it to be funny, and I wanted it to have a lot of different components," Dey told Q host Jian Ghomeshi. "So this is a book with short fiction, this is a book with graphs and charts and illustrations and a lot of anecdotes from babes and from bush pilots. And of course, its running engine is sex advice."

For Dey, this advice goes far beyond the clichéd tips and tricks. Igniting passion, it seems, requires much more than that.

"This is an era where we are always in a hurry and that is completely antithetical to sex," Dey said. "So this is a time where rather than experiencing the interior of a moment, we're tweeting about it, or we're sexting or we're busy with our Blackberries. And one of the recurring messages in this book is to take off your stopwatch and take your time."