Talk:The Haystack in the Floods

C. L. Moore

Author C. L. Moore writing about the creation of her most famous short story Shambleau. She is working as secretary 1933 and doing typing practice:

Midway down that yellow page I began fragments remembered from sophomore English at the university. All the choices were made at random. Keats, Browning, Byron—you name it. In the middle of this exercise a line from a poem (by William Morris?) worked itself to the front and I discovered myself typing something about a “red, running figure.” I looked at it a while, my mind a perfect blank, and then shifted mental gears without even adding punctuation to mark the spot, swinging with idiot confidence into the first lines of the story which ended up as “Shambleau.”

See C. L. Moore: Footnote to “Shambleau” … and Others. In: C. L. Moore: The Best of C. L. Moore. Ed. Lester del Rey. Nelson Doubleday / SFBC, 1975. See also: Susan Gubar: C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction. In: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, Science Fiction on Women, Science Fiction by Women (March 1980), p. 17.

The Haystack in the Floods, line 35 reads "Red running lions dismally" and otherwise the poem here fits, too. --WolfgangRieger (talk) 08:05, 16 April 2018 (UTC)