Judith Moffett has earned awards and recognition for 12 books across six different genres, but her recent memoir, Unlikely Friends (Time Tunnel Media), which earned a Kirkus Star, focuses on her singular friendship with the poet James Merrill. After taking his class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the two corresponded for the rest of Merrill’s life as Moffett became a professor herself, undertook translating the work of Hjalmar Gullberg from Swedish to English, and began to write science-fiction novels. A poet and academic at heart, she spoke with us about Merrill’s lasting influence on her work.

Why has it been important to you to work in such a wide range of genres?

It wasn’t! I never set out to be anything but a poet, and in fact nearly all my work is related to poetry in one way or another. The different genres just sort of happened as I went along through my life, had different experiences, and got interested in different things.

What drew you to science fiction?

I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy growing up—the books available in the children’s section of the public library in the 1950s.I don’t know why fantastic fiction appealed to me so much; I’m not sure any of us who grew up loving it understands exactly why the attraction was so intense, but I think as a group, we were probably rather “different” from the other kids. I was a compulsive reader; I needed to believe that life could be other, and better, than the one I was living.

What first made James Merrill so fascinating to you?

It’s hard to explain an initial attraction to a total stranger. Easier to say what it wasn’t: not a romantic spark, not shared activities and interests (apart from poetry), not a sense that here was an admirable character. He was altogether different from anyone I had ever met before, a sort of alien being in midwestern Wisconsin….These things are mysterious! You recognize something in the perfect stranger that can take years—decades!— to figure out. Unlikely Friends spends a lot of time struggling to unravel the nature of that initial fascination.

Why did you decide now to write about the personal relationship you had with him?

Despite a strong desire to add what I could to the Merrill legacy, fill in the picture from my own unique perspective, I could see that I would have to say a lot about myself as well in order for the story to make sense. And I felt that readers would want to know about the Great Poet, not about me. But I had kept a journal throughout the years of our friendship, had saved all his letters, and I am, after all, an academic as well as a writer! To own such a wealth of primary material and not use it to contribute anything to literary history felt wrong.

Why was it important to share your many years of correspondence?

The letters of writers are so often collected and published because they are fascinating to readers. It’s like eavesdropping on a private conversation between the poet and their various friends. Merrill was one of the last great correspondents; he had dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of friends with whom he exchanged letters regularly, and the letters are brilliant! And also, I wanted Jimmy to speak for himself in the memoir. The relationship had its ups and downs; I didn’t want anyone to doubt that what I reported about him is grounded in fact, in his own actual words, often quoted at length.

In revisiting your friendship, what surprised you the most?

The biggest surprise was how consistently I had misinterpreted Merrill’s attitude toward me. I thought all along that I had remained more or less on trial with him. Again and again, I saw tolerance and patience in the letters where I had recalled irritation. I certainly tried that patience, but he put up with me in a far kindlier way than I had remembered. That was a happy discovery.

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.