If Kamran Javadizadeh — and not C.S. Lewis — had written The Chronicles of Narnia, there might have been a dramatically different setting. Rather than the magical wardrobe portal opening into a wondrous kingdom of mythical beasts, the traveler would instead be transported to the equally fantastical interior of the James Merrill House in Stonington Borough.

In fact, awed by his surroundings and the exotic if scholarly history of the place during his first days as the latest writer-in-resident Fellow at the Merrill House, Javadizadeh sent photos and descriptions of his new quarters to friends. One responded, "It feels like you're in Narnia!"

"It's true. I am happily overwhelmed here," Javadizadeh says in a recent phone interview. "I had to manage some of those feelings early on so I wouldn't just spend all my time going through drawers or opening books and flipping through the pages hoping a secret key will fall out. Fortunately, I've been able to channel my excitement in a productive way and get some work done."

Merrill's legacy is certainly inspiring and/or intimidating. He won most major American literary prizes including two National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Award, the Library of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and more. His renowned epic "The Changing Light at Sandover" is largely based on Ouija board sessions he conducted, and his "Divine Comedies" is a collection of occult-inspired poetry.

Those otherworldly fascinations are present or implied throughout the nooks and crannies of the Merrill House. The late author's massive book collection is overwhelming and seductive in its vast diversity of topics and writers. A Ouija board — though not the "Sandover" Ouija board (which was hand-drawn by the writer and housed in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale) — is on site. And Merrill's record player and album collection offer aural possibilities that spin the listener hauntingly back through time.

Oh, and "yes, I've been working mostly in Merrill's secret study, the one you enter through a bookcase," Javadizadeh says. "How great is that? It's amazing. I've heard some of the (Merrill) fellows are more interested in the possibilities of a quiet space to work and maybe aren't particularly fans of Merrill or even poetry. For others like me, though, this is a magical opportunity because of how deeply we revere the man who lived and wrote here. You can certainly feel his presence."

It also helps, as Javadizadeh says, that "I've had some good fortune over the years to know people who knew Merrill. I had a class at Yale and the professor arranged a field trip for us to visit the Merrill House — where we were given a tour by (the late poet/librettist/Borough resident) Sandy McClatchy. That was the first time I met him, but I got to know him decently well after college and as a research assistant for him, and he was an important connection for me with this place."

Projects new and old

Javadizadeh is currently an associate professor at Villanova, where he teaches the history of poetry and poetics with an emphasis on American poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries. He grew up in southern California with his parents but spent 18 months as a toddler in ancestral Iran and later visited his grandparents there.

After earning his B.A. and Ph.D. at Yale, Javadizadeh also taught two years at Connecticut College in New London. His essays and criticisms have been published in the New Yorker, The Point and the New York Review of Books, and "Institutionalized Lyric," Javadizadeh's first book, will come out soon from Oxford University Press. In describing the book, Javadizadeh writes, "On the one hand, (U.S. poetry in the mid-20th century) was increasingly folded into and reliant upon academic, bureaucratic, and cultural institutions. On the other, breakdown, madness, and psychiatric institutionalization emerged in the period as central themes, both as topics for poems and as crucial experiences upon which many of those poems were based."

On Saturday, Javadizadeh will give a virtual reading from the Merrill House and converse with author and Merrill Foundation board member Willard Spiegelman.

"It's a relief that 'Institutionalized Lyric' is finished," Javadizadeh says. "That's been a labor of many years, and I'm proud of it and interested to see the response. At the same time, it's a scholarly book coming out from an academic press, and it's great to put that aside and do something new."

Grandfatherly connection

The project he's focused on as a Merrill fellow is memoiric, targets a wider readership demographic, and is anchored in the life and work of his maternal grandfather in Iran — who was an activist poet, a member of the communist Tudeh Party and imprisoned for seven months after the Shah returned to power after the 1953 coup.

"I have brief but special memories of my grandfather," Javadizadeh says. "I've spent much of my life hearing bits of stories from my mother, mainly about what it was like for them during those years — police coming at all hours of the night looking for him, or later, when she would visit him in prison."

One astonishing aspect of those times, Javadizadeh explains, is that his grandfather managed to continue to write his politically charged poetry from jail. He would compose on thin strips of paper and insert the pieces into the lining of his pajamas. As per established prisoner routine, Javadizadeh's grandmother would pick up her husband's dirty laundry at the prison and wash it at home. But before she cleaned it, she removed the strips of poetry for safekeeping, re-stitched the material, washed the clothes, and then returned it.

"Eventually, he was released, came home, made copies and, in many cases, annotated them," Javadizadeh says. "I was a teenager in the 1990s when he died, and my mother went back to Iran and got his poetry. We've been working on translations because, while I can speak Farsi, I can't read it. I need my mother's help.

"To me, there's something very profound about the opportunity to work here on this stuff. I feel a strong sense of connection to my grandfather. It's really strange and interesting to me that, as someone who's devoted my life to studying and writing about poetry and how it works, my own grandfather was a poet and yet I can't read his poems. I've never really had the chance until now to line up all these stories so there's a narrative with a beginning and an ending."

Morning ritual

Most of Javadizadeh's work schedule at the Merrill House is focused on the memoir, and he says the atmosphere is indeed conducive to exploring the ancestral filament of poetry in his life. But Javadizadeh also came up with a late-breaking, tangential writing project for his time in Stonington.

He decided that every morning, before he's even had his coffee, he peers at Merrill's bookshelves and grab a book that catches his fancy. Then, he randomly selects a long-replaying vinyl album from the poet's record collection and places it on the turntable. While each side plays in its entirety, Javadizadeh flips through the pages of that day's book and writes his thoughts and impressions in a journal. When the album is over, so is that day's diary-writing.

"I've stayed at it," he says. "I wasn't sure about it at first, but I stopped at Yale on the way up here and had lunch with my friend and former professor (and Merrill biographer) Lanny Hammer. I wanted reassurance because I wasn't sure pulling just any random book off a shelf would be interesting and would be worth my time.

"Lanny said, 'But it won't be RANDOM, really ...' And I understood him to mean that something — my unconscious? the spirit of the house? — would guide me to pick up a book worth writing about. That was a crucial bit of encouragement because Lanny is the most important teacher I've ever had. And his gentle intervention characteristically steered me in a fruitful direction."

On Javadizadeh and his ability to fuse frame scholarship in a fashion that can reach a broader audience, Hammer says, "Kamran has a literary gift that comes to the fore when he writes for a general reader. Like me, he has an interest in writers' lives, in how life gets into a writer's work, and, through the imagination and elegance of his own style, his writing comes alive. Nothing dry or dull or needlessly difficult about it."

So far, so good. As March spins towards April, Javadizadeh has maintained a steady course on both of his Merrill House projects. He enjoys walking to the point or jogging around the borough and, while still cautious of COVID concerns, he had lunch at Noah's with former Conn College professorial colleagues Ken Bleeth and Julie Rivkin. One weekend, Javadizadeh's 7-year-old daughter visited; they ate at the Dogwatch Café and explored Mystic.

"We had a blast. It's been a really interesting and positive experience here, and part of me wishes I could stay," Javadizadeh says. "This place has had an effect on me in a lot of ways. I've always been an academic literary critic and it's normal for me to deliver a paper or write an essay or give a lecture." He laughs. "But I have a fantasy about having a popular audience. There's a storytelling element to what I'm doing here and it's fun to figure out where it will go and who might read what I'm writing."

To see and hear

Who: Merrill House writer-in-resident Kamran Javadizadeh

What: Virtual reading and discussion with Javadizadeh and author/scholar/Merrill House board member Willard Spiegelman

When: 5 p.m. Saturday

How much: Free

How to access: James Merrill House Facebook and YouTube channels

For more information: www.jamesmerrillhouse.org