But truthfully, I am an outlier among other outliers: you have to be a little touched to find creative inspiration in a 15-by-15 black and white grid. Since I began creating puzzles at age fifteen, I knew that as a humanities-minded female I was an outlier in the CrossWorld, a realm dominated by middle-aged men hailing from the natural and computer sciences. This was my first ACPT-my crossword cotillion-and I spent the first night’s mixer matching faces to bylines. The logistics of the tournament, which, when articulated sound like the start of a bad joke (“How do you fit 700 crossword solvers into a conference room?”), had occupied us for months.
At the time, I had just graduated from college and was working four days a week for Shortz, helping him edit puzzles and prepare them for print in the New York Times-by many measures, the gold standard of grids. My responsibilities at the event were threefold: I was there as a judge, as Will Shortz’s assistant, and as a constructor with a puzzle in the tournament. In March I attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, an annual gathering of speed-solvers, puzzle constructors, and other eccentrics hosted by Will Shortz at the Brooklyn Marriott.
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