Judith Halberstam is a professor of English and the director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. She is the author of (among other books) Female Masculinity and In a Queer Time and Place.
Q: What is your preferred environment for writing?
A: sitting in my eames chair with tea and a view . . .
Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?
A: i am a comma guy, i like the subordinate clause, the sentence that never ends, that strings random thoughts together, joined only by commas, the occasional ellipsis . . . and peters out . . .
Q: What punctuation, spelling, grammar, style, or usage error annoys you the most?
A: passive voice
Q: If you weren't in your current line of work, what would you be doing instead?
A: journalist or pilot or ferryman, film critic for the new york times, soap opera writer
Q: What drove you to become a writer?
A: i don't really think of myself as a writer, i think of myself as someone who sits in an eames chair avoiding the passive voice, crafting run-on sentences, and wondering whether i could always end with an ellipsis instead of a full stop . . .
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