Yellowknife (Sep 20/04) - Writers across the NWT now have access to the Territorial Writers' Association's first writer-in-residence.

Sunday was the kick-off for the Masterclass Wired Workshop, funded by the NWT Arts Council, in which Susan Haley will be working with members of the Territorial Writers' Association online until December.

Technology, Haley said, is a writer's best friend. In the old days, editing and revision was a long, labour intensive process of retyping page after page.

"What the computer shows us is that the typewriter was really an instrument of the devil," said Haley, who lived in the North for 15 years.

Writers tend to be isolated by the solitary nature of their work. In the NWT, that isolation is exacerbated by the distances between communities and the small size of those settlements.

With the Masterclass Workshop, association members will be able to correspond with the writer-in-residence by e-mail and get feedback on their manuscripts.

Haley was also the keynote speaker at the TWA's fourth annual conference, which took place Saturday and Sunday at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife.

Haley set up shop last week in a quiet room tucked away in the stacks of the Yellowknife Public Library.

No advice-seeking writers have sought her out so far, but she expects to become busier after the writer's conference, and once she gets a big sign up pointing to her door.

"But it's good for me," Haley laughed. "I've been getting my own work done."

Haley has been taking advantage of her library location to research Emile Petitot, the explorer who visited the Mackenzie Valley in the 18th century. Petitot's travels will form the basis of her next novel.

As her first book, A Nest of Singing Birds, was published in 1984 while she was living in Tulita, Haley thinks she may have been one of the first fiction writers in the NWT.

Though Haley was born in Nova Scotia, she taught philosophy at the University of Calgary and the University of Saskatchewan and began her writing career during the years she lived north of 60. Haley owned and operated Ursus Aviation in Fort Norman, now Tulita, until 1991. She has since returned to the Maritimes.

Her best known novels are her first two, A Nest of Singing Birds and Getting Married in Buffalo Jump, both of which were made into CBC movies. Haley had little input into the movie adaptations.

She thinks her recent novels, which include The Complaints Department, How to Start a Charter Airline and The Murder of Medicine Bear are her better books, though they're less well-known.