Who's this know-it-all Roth, anyway

American novelist Philip Roth wanted to correct the Wikipedia entry article about his novel The Human Stain. But what would he know? All he did was write the thing.

Roth describes his experience with Wikipedia in an open letter in The New Yorker, in which he says Wikipedia wrongly attributed the novel's inspiration to the story of a writer named Anatole Broyard.

When Roth told the Wikipedia administrators that he hadn't been inspired by Broyard's life, but by an incident that occurred to a friend of his at Princeton, the Wikipedia administrator replied: "I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources."

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Two Manitoba writers, Joan Thomas and Sally Ito, will offer advice and encouragement this fall through writer-in-residence programs.

Thomas, whose novels Curiosity and Reading by Lightning garnered national acclaim, is this year's Winnipeg Public Library writer-in-residence. From Oct. 1 to April 30, she will be available to read short manuscripts and meet with writers.

She can be contacted at wpl.writerinres@gmail.com.

Ito, a poet, essayist and short story writer, will serve as writer-in-residence this fall at the University of Manitoba's Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.

The centre launches her term Sept. 21 at 11:30 a.m. with a reading, reception and lunch, open to the public, in the Great Hall of University College.

Ito's most recent poetry collection, Alert to Glory, was published last year by Turnstone Press.

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Penguin Canada will publish a memoir and manifesto next year by an international leader of the fight to preserve the Arctic from global warming.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, will argue in her book The Right to be Cold that preventing the damage caused by global warming is a human rights issue. The book will be published by Penguin's non-fiction imprint Allen Lane.

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With more writers turning to social media to promote their work, even literary characters now have an Internet presence. One of those is the title character from Winnipegger Kevin Marc Fournier's young adult novel The Green-Eyed Queen of Suicide City, published by the local house Great Plains Publications.

Fournier has created a Twitter account for the Queen, who utters cryptic sayings about life and death, such as "Why did I die? I expect I was upset, or bored, or something. I'm sure I must have had an excellent reason."

See the tweets at Twitter.com/QueenEyed.

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Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 15, 2012 J8