NYT Crossword Fellowship
Late in 2023, Aaron texted Avery to say that the NYT diversity fellowship was opening up for submissions! Avery had not applied the year before due to her status as the first time parent of a newborn. She thought, why not, and submitted a puzzle she gridded the previous year.
After a summer of multiple job rejection emails per day, it was a big surprise when the acceptance email came. Avery was so excited and was telling everyone that came over. Morgan and most of her friends were not impressed at the thought of meeting Will Shortz. “Who?” they said.
The kickoff meeting was too crossword-star studded for Avery to handle. She had almost no idea what happened because she was too star-struck with Will Shortz, Joel Fagliano, Wyna Liu, Sam Ezersky, Christina Iverson, Tracy Bennett, and Everdeen Mason on the call.
Avery’s mentor was Wyna Liu and she was so enthusiastic and supportive the whole fellowship (and afterwards!). Due to the 3 hour time difference and Avery’s schedule with a toddler, the best time to meet was 6 AM PST. Every week however, Avery would be so jazzed about working on the puzzle she would wake up at 4 AM with a brain full of ideas and have to get out of bed and into CrossFire.
The other women in the fellowship were inspiring to work with as well. During the workshop sessions they had such smart and funny ideas for clues and Avery wished she had been able to come up with themes like theirs.
Throughout the workshop sessions and presentation sessions, they really got to know the editors better. Joel was amazing with grids, Wyna was whimsical and always trying help us make our puzzles “sparkle”, Sam has a mental encyclopedia of every NYT crossword published (and probably more outlets and tournaments), Christina and Tracy had high bars for theme cohesion and were really helpful in showing why certain sets were better than others. All of the editors were kind, thoughtful, considerate of the solver, and so passionate about the craft of crossword construction and wordplay. The Times crossword could not be in better hands.
Avery’s puzzle she worked on was published on Mother’s Day May 12, 2024. You can play it here.
Read on for spoilers:
The hardest part of constructing this puzzle was fitting the theme entries in the grid- in this particular rebus puzzles, the theme answers couldn’t be symmetrical. It was a challenge that took 19 different grids to get all of the themers in, spread out across the grid, and with “clean” fill.
Initially, all of the rebus answers were more hidden in the phrases and all with different meanings from the Pixar movies. The title PIXARBOXSET was also the center entry. The editors, however, felt that this would be harder for the solvers since every rebus square was unique and the revealer wouldn’t be discovered right away. Relaxing those constraints added enough flexibility to get a much cleaner fill.
Some of the themers that got replaced along the way were TACOCOMBO, LUCASARTS, COBRAVENOM, and NEWCARSMELL. There were a lot of reasons for themers to get thrown out- for example COCOCHANEL was potentially problematic due to her Nazi connections (something a casual like Avery didn’t know about). IMNOSUPERMAN was said to be too niche – Scrubs theme song. And NEWCARSMELL had to get scrapped because BRAVENEWWORLD was needed and NEW would be duped.
Cluing was the highlight of the construction process. Aaron and Dad both helped lending ideas… Aaron and Avery really liked Bake brownies for COOKPOT, but this unfortunately didn’t follow NYT cluing standards (because it’s changing the meaning). DETONATOR was a tricky one because it’s kind of a negative and associated with bombs and destruction, Avery’s solution was to make it more cartoony with a Wile E. Coyote reference.
The final proof came back with maybe 35% of the clues changed. It ended up being harder than the submitted cluing (at least for Avery!) as they added a bunch of trivia that she wasn’t familiar with. Avery thinks she would have struggled to finish the puzzle on her own.