The Swarthmore Phoenix, our student newspaper, has been publishing crosswords for years now. Recently, we were lucky enough to have Anna Shechtman, a crossword constructor, editor, and author of “The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle” (and Swarthmore alumni!) speak at the college about her experience with solving and editing crossword puzzles–and how she had started out submitting puzzles to our humble newspaper.
Shechtman, in her talk, talked about attempting to bring crosswords into the modern age. The New Yorker crossword she helped create is at the spearhead of this–the crossword at the day of writing, by incredible crossword creator Robin Weintraub, contains the lively answers GENDER BIAS, IT WAS ONLY A DREAM, HERESY, NOW PLAYING, and ARREST WARRANT. Shectman gave a fascinating reading of her book–intertwining what making puzzles meant (and still means), her time as an intern at the New York Times as a woman in a male-dominated field, and her experience with anorexia, in an involving tale.
Afterwards, she had a Q+A session, where I, and the numerous other crossword fans who had gathered, asked her for inside information on the world of crossword solving and talked amongst ourselves. The perspectives of community members who had come to the talk were fascinating–one claimed that the crossword in recent years had become too easy. I, for my part, find the late-week crosswords to be a substantial challenge (with archaic land payment systems, 80s-baseball players, vacuum-cleaner brands, and defunct airlines being particular areas of weakness for me). Shechtman talked about this generational gap in puzzles and how it is created by the hierarchies in place–the editors of puzzles, with their own biases, unintentionally design the clues and grids to cater to an audience of older, more masculine solvers. We also discussed the challenges in trying to get crosswords to include a broader variety of both solvers and constructors, and how diversity efforts have both succeeded and failed in different parts of the “crossworld,” a surprisingly vast array of people, in a term I just made up.
I was also fortunate enough to get a one-on-one interview with Shechtman herself, and asked her about how her time at Swarthmore and interest in puzzles had carried on into her now blossoming academic career.
In college, Shechtman was an English major, and she says, without the works of James Joyce, she would likely not have continued making puzzles. Joyce’s modernist work–most famously Ulysses–is rife with wordplay, puzzles, and games. In her reading, Shechtman encountered Joyce and was fascinated. “It’s not hard to see why a young crossword constructor would enjoy these word games,” she writes.
The reason this topic has kept her interest for so long (and is the subject of her new book, The Riddle of the Sphinx, is that the crossword puzzle is a fascinating cultural object–a form of mass cultural creation that involves much more active participation from the receiver, a litmus test for what passes as popular culture, and an object of both domesticity and high culture.
The crosswords she constructed for the Phoenix were often representative of what she had cared about at the time–one of her crosswords was about George Bush and the Iraq War (“everyone enjoyed solving them, even though we hated him”). She hadn’t thought about the possibility of publishing them until her boyfriend encouraged her to submit them, after which she began her professional relationship with the New York Times crossword, and the rest is history.
Even if you’ve never solved a crossword puzzle, Shechtman has advice for beginners. “Don’t get discouraged. When you come back to a crossword puzzle a few hours later, you will know things you didn’t know before. Don’t lose patience; just come back to it later!” (Honestly just a great life lesson always.) Maybe, for college students, her other piece of advice is also helpful in life, and for those going to college. When you need help, you can look to others; “It’s not cheating, it’s learning.”
