She looks as if she’s been dipped in sugar, as if she’s destined to top some outré wedding cake: a young woman completely dusted with fine powdered snow. Playwright Claudia Dey steps out of the late winter blizzard and into Arabesque, a small neighbourhood café at College and Gladstone. Peering through snow-crusted glasses, she may look like a snow angel, but she orders against type. “We’ll have Blood of the Pigeon,” she tells the man behind the counter. She’s ordering a fragrant Arabic tea. “The recipe is a secret,” she tells me, adopting, for an instant, the persona of seasoned slumber party confidante. Later she’ll admit that the ingredients are listed on the tea box, but in the moment she can’t resist the fib: dramatic flourish is a Claudia Dey trademark.

She’s 35 years old, has three successful plays to her credit and is celebrating the release of her first novel, Stunt, which was five years in the making and falls prancingly within her signature look-at-me Canadian Gothic genre (unlikely plots, bizarre characters and a sometimes embarrassingly florid style). It’s a genre she honed with plays like Beaver, The Gwendolyn Poems (a finalist for the 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama) and Trout Stanley (which opened in Los Angeles last month).

She has also, for the past year, written a weekly advice column called Group Therapy for The Globe and Mail, in which readers get to advise on relationship woes but Claudia Dey always gets the last word. She’s very good at it. The answers are smart, the tone light, almost buoyant, never superior or patronizing, somehow musical. She was invited to audition for the gig, and her on-line Globe bio summarizes her tongue-in-cheek credentials: “Much of her childhood was spent keeping other people’s secrets and, when in need, building them life rafts out of advice. Older now, she aspires to be a northern Ann Landers—sans pearls, avec cigar.”

It’s not her first gig as a columnist. Under the pseudonym Bebe O’Shea, she wrote a sex advice column for the defunct men’s magazine Toro, adopting the persona, as she put it, “of a bossy madam in a men’s locker room” and gleefully advising Canadian jocks on such subjects as how to take it up the butt without any Deliverance-style squealing. “I adored that gig,” she says. “It taught me a lot about prose, about writing the voluptuous sentence.” And did she personally research every topic? “Well,” she smiles, “dot dot dot.”

An unlikely employ for a good girl from the right side of the tracks, or maybe an obvious one given that flirting with the dark side is a favourite pastime. Born in Toronto, she grew up in the Republic of Rathnelly, that artily intellectual enclave north of Dupont and west of Avenue Road, her father a lawyer, her mother an artist devoted to miniature books and boxes made from Japanese paper. She worked with textiles, too, making dolls that Dey calls “a bit macabre, but textured and elegant at the same time.”

“Like your prose?” I ask her.

“Oh,” she says, “I hope so.”

She studied English at McGill, took playwriting at the National Theatre School, worked summers planting trees (her plays are often set in places she knows, like Grizzly Alley or Misery Junction), gypsied about for a while, never knew the torment of a nine-to-fiver and eventually developed a connection with Factory Theatre that flowered into a playwright-in-residence position where she wrote her three plays. She married, too—Don Kerr plays cello and drums in Ron Sexsmith’s band and played with the Rheostatics before that. They live in the College and Dufferin area (fittingly between homey Little Italy and edgy Parkdale) and have a two-year-old son. She thought she would always need silence and solitude to write until her son arrived. “I could do it with a jack­hammer beside me now,” she says.

She has a restless eye, periodically pointing out the street life outside the café windows. “That’s the glove fairy,” she says, motioning to a gentleman, a neighbourhood regular, wheeling a shopping cart packed high with bags of gloves. She’s gleeful, too, about a man tromping by in the swirling snow in shorts. No surprise, then, that her work often grows from what she calls “an inciting image” (for Beaver, “a girl in her mother’s clothes, in a graveyard, in Timmins”).

Stunt, on the surface a shaggy-dog-ish story of a girl’s search for her father, has its share of incitement (postcards from outer space, twins, taxidermy, the explosion of a shoulder pad factory), and its share of this city, as well. The Toronto Islands and Parkdale play prominent roles. She says Stunt is a book about daring and the disruptions of love, “part love letter to the wilder corners of Toronto.”

As she contemplates a second cup of Blood of the Pigeon, it’s clear that the wilder corners are where she’s at home.