SOME YEARS ago I had a curious dream about my friend Adele Wiseman. We were walking single file along the balcony of a church when there was suddenly a gap in the flooring. Adele hopped over it nimbly. I went through, broke my fall on various projections, and landed safely. But when I ran back up the stairs calling Adele, she'd vanished. "I'd probably slipped through the next gap," she said cheerfully when I told her about it.

Slipped through? Not very likely. Kicking and screaming perhaps while two or three people struggled to shove her over the edge. She was a tremendous fighter - in her living and in her dying. I was involved in several epic battles with her - on the same side luckily; I'd have hated to be on the other side. Fights for principle, against wrongs major and minor. I occasionally felt, especially towards the last, that she engaged at times in battles that weren't worth the time and energy she gave to them. But that was her way, and it's sad and a bit frightening to realize that we'll have to fight our own battles now. For the fights weren't always on her own behalf. A disparaging review of a piece of writing she valued would send her at once to the typewriter to set the reviewer to rights.

She was one of the most generous people I've ever known - generous to all her friends, especially if those friends were members of "the tribe," as her friend Margaret Laurence called the writing community. When she was approached by a professor from abroad who was interested in Canadian writing and had come to her as the author of two important novels, The Sacrifice and Crackpot, she'd at once gather her writer friends together so that we could share in the benefits of the contact, whatever they were. Even last fall, when she was already too ill with the sarcoma that killed her to arrange one of her large, exuberant gatherings, she introduced me over the phone to an Italian professor because she believed this young woman might be useful to me and I to her. And when she travelled to China in 1981 as one of a group of seven Canadian writers and editors, she took along a suitcase - laden with her friends' books.

I've known Adele for a long time. I miss hearing her excited voice, always with something to report, something to give. We met in 1955 in Kingston, Ontario, at a writers' conference arranged by F. R. Scott, at a time when she was not yet a published writer, though she'd completed the manuscript of a novel that was believed to be good. The novel in question was The Sacrifice, and it was indeed good, a strong account of life among Jewish immigrants in North Winnipeg, where she was born - a sort of modem retelling of the biblical Abraham story that won the Governor General's medal (just a medal in those days) in 1956.

We didn't become friends till some time in the 1970s, after she'd moved to Toronto with her husband and daughter. By then she'd also published Crackpot, a rich, often very funny, always compassionate novel about a prostitute of great innocence, a much more complex figure than the syrupy, golden-hearted whore of sentimental fiction. Nor does she come to a bad end. In fact she achieves a very good marriage, just what she deserves. Some have called the novel too sprawling, too wordy. But Hoda, as Adele presented her, was such a large figure that she needed a great many words.

After this came Old Woman at Play, a study of the creative process, based on the "haunting evocative dolls" (Adele's words) that her mother made from various bits and pieces. The book was launched (without the physical books, as is so often the case) by two of Adele's "doll shows." Her mother, whom Adele nursed tenderly through her long death from cancer, was present, surrounded by her creations and blowing kisses to the delighted audience. There was also Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood, a collection of personal essays, some light-hearted, others going more deeply into problems of creativity and politics, all imbued with Adele's characteristic mix of irony, penetration, and sheer fight. Most of the writing ot her final years was sporadic, even fugitive. Two plays that were not staged. A few short stones. She was too busy with what she called "the acting out of days," being a mother, a friend, a fighter And of course sharing what she'd learned with younger or potential members of "the tribe." At the time of her death she was head of the writing program at the Banff School of Fine Arts and she had served as writer-in-residence at Toronto, Western, Windsor, and a number of other universities.

However, she has left us one final magnificent long story. When I met her on the street early in January -she was still strong enough to give Osker, her beloved miniature schnauzer, his twice-daily walks - she told me she was a bit late with a story she'd promised to the Malahat Review. All writers know about the slightly (or more than slightly) missed deadline, and Adele was by this time in great pain. But she finished the story, "Goon of the Moon and the Expendables," and it appeared in the spring issue of Malahat, in time for Adele to see it and to receive some of the praise the story deserves. It's a lively, compassionate, and vivid study of human courage, a tribute to those forgotten ones she calls "the maimed, the incomplete, the scattered ... who had had every promise broken in the molecule." If there had to be a last word from Adele, and like all her friends I'll always regret that this was required of her so soon, I can't think of a more appropriate one than this powerful and moving story.