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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, search for the hidden meaning in language…shuffle those letters around… ‘gnu algae’! That’s it! It was staring us in the face this entire time!
Welcome to another instalment in the Word Play series, about word games and word puzzles; and this episode is about crosswords! This topic has come up a couple of times before in the show: one of the very earliest episodes was about how the British-style cryptic crosswords work, and in the 2017 episode In Crypt, Decrypt, I covered the Lollapuzzoola crossword tournament in New York City. Today we hear from some people doing some very cool stuff in crosswords in the USA.
Content note: there is one category B swear.
On with the show.
ERIK AGARD: What I see a lot in crosswords is, I think, not unique to crosswords where historically they've been for a very specific cross-section of an audience. They're written with certain people in mind, and certain other people not in mind. And I think we're starting to see the tip of the iceberg of some changes that expands the range of who they're for. And as you start to see that, those people in that first group are going, "This is worse than death. How how can you take this thing away from me by having like one rap clue?"
HZ: It would be terrible if they ever had any real problems.
ERIK AGARD: It would.
My name is Erik Agard. I am a crossword constructor and editor. I've been constructing puzzles for over a decade and started editing about five years ago.
HZ: I first met you in 2017 at Lollapuzzoola, and talked to a bunch of people who were like, "A lot of the big setters are old white men, and a lot of their references are stuff that you had to be an old white man who was collecting like baseball cards in the 1950s to understand." Is that a reasonable perspective of a few years ago? And is that still dominant in the field, or have things shifted?
ERIK AGARD: Yeah. If you start in the archives of like the New York Times crossword today and you solve backwards in time, you will absolutely see that more and more. I know so much more about baseball in like the 1930s than I did before I started solving crosswords. I know so many Beatles titles and lyrics that I did not know. I think today it's a lot younger in some instances: you know, the Beatles have been replaced by Taylor Swift; the baseball is sometimes other sports. I think there are still many of the same gaps that were there before are there now, and people are working on that with varying degrees of success, but change is always glacial.
HZ: What pleases you most about this work?
ERIK AGARD: Coming up with a great clue is always like - I will stand up at my desk and fist-pump like a golfer. It's really, really fun to make a grid for me. It's just something that's very like meditative. It's a puzzle in and of itself, just to find words that go together in a very satisfying way.
So constructing a crossword typically involves: you come into it with some kind of idea, it can be either a word or phrase that you really like; often, there's some kind of wordplay going on; a few of the answers in the puzzle will be interconnected in some way that's clever or informative.
HZ: OK, you fill the grid with the answers first - writing the clues comes later.
ERIK AGARD: In the old days, and some people still today, people would fill it by hand, but a lot of it is software today. Usually, when you're constructing a puzzle by software, you have a word list, which is supposed to be every word you could conceivably want to put in a crossword and the software will pick out the best combinations of words that will fill out a grid.
HZ: The software can tell the crossword constructor: here are words that will fit the grid and intersect with each other.
ERIK AGARD: Historically, word lists are drawn from maybe a series of dictionaries and other like reference sources, and then also what has been in other puzzles. So if somebody puts an answer in a puzzle, it goes into a word list and then it comes up for you to use it as an answer. So there's this kind of feedback loop. My problem is I'll be constructing and I'm going through my word list, and there's like so many names of plant genuses and old athletes that I'm never ever going to use. But then I'm like, “Oh, wait a minute - this list doesn't have, you know, Keke Palmer in it,” or whatever.
And a couple of years ago, another really good constructor named Erica Hsiung Wojcik started this thing called the Expanded Name Database. It's a crowdsourced list of like people and terms from marginalized cultures that you can just add on to your word list and make better puzzles.
The human part of it is deciding what's the best words, right? Like what you think is interesting, what you think people are going to know, things like that. And then just writing clues, writing fun, interesting clues.
HZ: When you say “what you think people are going to know”, do you ever hear from indignant people who are like, "How am I supposed to know that, Erik?"
ERIK AGARD: Oh, only about one in every one times I have a puzzle out will I hear that.
HZ: Very low proportion.
ERIK AGARD: Yeah. I tend to operate a lot in like Black culture for a lot of my puzzles, and I guess a lot of people who - or some people who - solve crosswords really don't at all, so you will hear things like, "Keke Palmer, who's that?"
HZ: That is just rude.
ERIK AGARD: "I've never heard of shrimp and grits!"
HZ: I mean, they should be ashamed of their ignorance rather than sharing it.
ERIK AGARD: It's okay to not know things, but the way that you handle not knowing things is, is perhaps important, but everybody has their gaps.
HZ: And then if you’re publishing the puzzle via an organisation, how much editorial input do they have? Do they make many changes?
ERIK AGARD: It depends on the place. Puzmo is a relatively new crossword outlet, and I think that's one of the places that really leans into preserving constructor voice and constructor intent. I've had a puzzle there where barely any edits happen. But, yeah, a lot of places will change 50 to 80 percent of someone's clues. And sometimes you get the opportunity to look at a proof beforehand and see their changes and say, "I'm uncomfortable with this," or "I really wanted this angle," and maybe they revert it or make some change, maybe they don't. But once it's out of your hands and into their inbox, it's kind of the wild west for a lot of places.
RACHEL FABI: The man is a genius. If Erik gave me a puzzle, I would not even edit it. I would be like, “Okay. This is ready for publication.”
HZ: That's crossword constructor and academic Rachel Fabi; you'll hear more from her later.
While crossword constructors like Erik, who make puzzles for some of the bigger outlets like newspapers, have little control over what happens to their clues, they also don’t know when their puzzles will get published.
ERIK AGARD: Something happens, I write a puzzle about it. And then two years later, the puzzle is running, with half of my clues changed.
HZ: Two years??
ERIK AGARD: I've heard of one guy whose submission got accepted and then lost for eleven years. I'm pretty sure that's the record.
HZ: Wow. Maybe some of the references are that out of date because the puzzles have been behind a desk for like ten years, just lost.
ERIK AGARD: Right, they find something from the 1960s and they were like, "Hey, this is in pretty good shape!"
HZ: Just blow the dust off - “Yeah, Ringo Starr's still in his 20s.”
ERIK AGARD: But yeah, it depends on the place. I think if I send a puzzle today, it might run in anywhere between three months and a year and a half, two years.
HZ: So you can't put in anything super current.
ERIK AGARD: Right.
HZ: Is that frustrating, not knowing?
ERIK AGARD: It's… yeah, it's frustrating not being able to - I mean, I think the great thing about indie puzzles and places where you're able to have a quicker turnaround is you can, you know, Beyoncé surprise drops an album today and tomorrow she can be in the puzzle. And I think that's just a lot more fun as a solver and as a constructor.
HZ: Although the newspapers are still where a puzzle is most likely to get a big audience, in recent years, there have been far more options for constructing and publishing crosswords.
ERIK AGARD: As crosswords have become more of an online thing, there's definitely been a lot more activity in the indie realm. And you're starting to see things like - one of my favorite crosswords that I play every day is Black Crossword by Juliana Pache.
HZ: Oh, it's good.
ERIK AGARD: Yeah, love it so much. It's just a five by five, usually mini puzzle, and it's just like one brilliant person making a puzzle every day.
JULIANA PACHE: My name is Juliana Pache. I'm the founder of Black Crossword. It is a digital destination for daily mini crossword puzzles dedicated to Black culture. I launched it January 2023, and we have a book coming out in August, our first puzzle book of minis, with Amistad HarperCollins. You can pre-order that wherever you get your books.
HZ: What was the first crossword puzzle you ever made?
JULIANA PACHE: So I had the idea for Black Crossword before I'd ever made a crossword puzzle, actually.
HZ: Love it.
JULIANA PACHE: Yeah, I know. Wild. Wild! I love word games, I love brain teasers, so I had the idea for Black Crossword when I was playing the New York Times mini, and it felt pretty white that day. I had the thought, “I wonder if there's a Black version of this,” and so at first I was looking for it, and then I discovered that it didn't exist. And I was like, "Huh, well, I'll just make it, and I'll figure out how to make a crossword puzzle, that'll be fine! It'll be easy!" Little did I know!
HZ: It seems really hard to make a puzzle every day.
JULIANA PACHE: It is! It's a lot of work. It took me a bit of time to figure out how to do it. I started with minis, and those are more manageable for day to day, much more manageable for a day to day. We typically have five by five minis. Sometimes they get a little bit bigger towards the weekend. Because they are 5x5s, there are certain words that come up so often, while I'm creating puzzles, I'll have to block out certain words because they come up so much, and I don't want them to be repetitive. I try to have at least three clues related specifically to Black culture, but the rest of them are more general.
HZ: And because Juliana publishes her crosswords herself, on her own website BlackCrossword.com, she isn’t working to the unknown publication dates that Erik mentioned; she constructs her puzzles just a few days before they go live, sometimes even the day before.
JULIANA PACHE: And sometimes that serves me well, because if there's something timely happening in the news, then I can very quickly maximize on the moment and incorporate it into tomorrow's puzzle somehow.
HZ: How have you felt that your crossword constructing has evolved?
JULIANA PACHE: I think it's gotten a lot better. There are small etiquette-related things that I didn't consider in the beginning of crossword puzzle constructing, and I really appreciate the crossworld and the crossword puzzle community, because the way that they will gently mention a style thing has been so helpful in my getting better at this medium.
HZ: So what kind of etiquette are we talking about?
ERIK AGARD: There's like five or six things that somebody in the 1950s just decided, like, this is the way that every crossword should be, and now you just have to do them if you want to get a puzzle published most places. Like the grid has to be rotationally symmetrical, which means that if you flip it upside down, the Black square pattern stays the same. The theme answers, if there's a theme, have to be symmetrical with each other in the grid. If it's a Monday puzzle, you can go up to 78 words. But if it's a Friday puzzle, you can only do 72 words. If it's a Sunday puzzle, you can only do 140 words. Which is so incredibly annoying, and unnecessary. You as a solver have never sat there and been like, "Oh, this puzzle has 142 words? What a piece of shit!"
JULIANA PACHE: There's so much to think about. There's also you don't want to put anything too gruesome or gross or having to do with bodily fluids because you want it to pass the breakfast test, which is basically you don't want to be eating your breakfast, doing the crossword puzzle and be thinking about bodily fluids.
HZ: The Breakfast Test seems quite a divisive concept among crossword constructors - I guess some of them DO want to be thinking about bodily fluids over their breakfast crossword.
ERIK AGARD: All of these rules do not benefit solvers and I think if you just want to start making crossword puzzles, you can do that and you can follow the rules or not follow the rules. It's just, if you want to start getting published, most places, it's something that you have to invest time into learning. And I think that's unnecessary and procrustean and in a lot of cases should be abolished, but that's kind of the lay of the land right now.
HZ: If we check back in in seven years, maybe it will be abolished.
ERIK AGARD: If you check back in in seven years and symmetry is no longer required in any major venue, you will find me retired living happily in a cottage on an island.
HZ: Oh it was symmetry that was the enemy all along.
HZ: Although not for Rachel Fabi!
RACHEL FABI: I prefer symmetrical puzzles. That's not a universal preference, but I think it goes with my aesthetic preferences. I actually think it adds a useful constraint, because when you can put blocks anywhere, and you can put whatever you want in the puzzle, there are too many options. So I like having the constraint of symmetry because it helps me pare down my options.
And then the most interesting themes will impose a constraint on what you can put in the puzzle. And so trying to find the tightest set, which is like the smallest possible set of things that have something in common, is a really sort of challenging but rewarding part of constructing. For me, personally, the hardest part is writing the clues. I really enjoy the process of putting a grid together. And once the grid's together, I want to make another grid, I don't want to write clues!
HZ: Juliana, what have you found particularly satisfying when constructing Black Crossword?
JULIANA PACHE: Hmmm… when there's a cultural reference that I just know would otherwise not exist in a crossword puzzle, I'm like, “Oh! This is what makes this so special. So for example, one of the clues today is "Type of surfing? [Question mark]" and unless you know the very popular song - well at least in in Black communities and Black culture - Swag Surfin’, you might not really understand that, but you know it's kind of cheeky. So that kind of clue really can exist in the context of Black Crossword. So things like that are really fun for me. I don't have to over explain a cultural reference as I might need to in a more general crossword puzzle.
HZ: I found out that Faith Ringgold had died from doing the puzzle. I was like, "Oh! Faith Ringgold - oh no, she died?"
JULIANA PACHE: Oh, no!
HZ: I mean, I know she was old, but I was still like, "Oh damn!"
JULIANA PACHE: Yes. R. I. P. Faith Ringgold.
HZ: If this is how you found out that the artist Faith Ringgold died in April 2024 at the age of 93, well, I’m sorry. But what a great reminder to go look at some Faith Ringgold art. Despite my surprise at her death, I was still very excited to see her as a crossword clue.
ADRIAN JOHNSON:My first solo byline was about three years ago. It was a Mario Brothers theme. Bringing video games into the puzzle lexicon, it brings a little bit of joy to your life like a little comic relief sometimess The Mario Bros. one, people had a cultural fiesta over, saying, "Oh, gasp! Mario Bros is worth the same cultural stock as, like, Shakespeare or opera or old baseball players with three letter names that we still only know because they only appear in crosswords," and I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, isn't it cool?"
I'm Adrian Johnson. I'm a professional crossword constructor. I started writing after solving came relatively easily to me. I've kind of solved, like, crosswords here and there a little bit, since I was in middle and high school. I'd look over people's shoulders and tell them the answers, and then they'd get mad, and they'd be like, "Go get your own." And eventually I listened when I was a junior in college.
HZ: At the time, Adrian was dealing with a bad situation with his roommate, so to avoid having to spend time in the room with them, he would go and hang out in the basement of the campus centre, doing puzzle after puzzle from the New York Times archives.
ADRIAN JOHNSON: I would just sit on my phone and I would play for like three, four hours, sometimes non-stop. That kind of sense of escape from what was otherwise a really, really challenging semester personally: I don't even know if it like brought me joy, per se, mindlessly going through puzzles; it was more of a way to latch on and find something positive to invest in and to let control me rather than the kind of realities I was dealing with. And so that kind of spiraled, in a good way, from solving months and months and months and years of puzzles, into that curiosity of what makes a good puzzle? How do you do it? Where am I going to learn?
HZ: At first Adrian made his own grids on Microsoft Word, before finding out about the various options for puzzle-specific software.
ADRIAN JOHNSON: There's a whole nother community on Discord, even on Reddit, on Facebook that is willing to put in the work to share the tricks of the trade with you and be that support for an otherwise really nerdy hobby. You need to be engaging with the community. You need to be learning and growing and trying new puzzles and expanding your vocabulary, reading about the world, playing trivia - doing all these great stuff. Keep it fresh, keep what the idea of puzzles and games could mean to you, always fresh and never fully set in its one way.
I taught my 13-year-old cousin how to write a crossword, and we wrote one collectively for Universal last year. It ran in February 2023. I've worked with people at like the Peace Corps. I started mentoring a Palestinian woman who came across our Puzzles for Palestine.
HZ: Puzzles for Palestine is a pack of crossword puzzles that Adrian and Olivia Mitra Framke put together with a team of crossword constructors, to raise money for humanitarian aid organisations working in Palestine, and to feature more Palestinian culture and references than most crosswords made outside of Palestine tend to do.
ADRIAN JOHNSON: You can highlight a Palestinian artist, or a type of movement, or a type of style you really like. It could be words like 'olive', that have very direct connections to Palestine. It could be also different dual use items, like a key, the symbol of Palestinians right of return that they often wear on a necklace to symbolize their homes that were taken during the Nakba. One of my favorite themes - how much spoiling do you want me to do?
HZ: It’s up to you.
ADRIAN JOHNSON: There's a Palestinian rice dish that's prepared in a very specific way and its ingredients are hidden in one of the crosswords. There's quite a few based around Palestinian food. Natan Last, who's done a lot of tremendous work in refugee advocacy: he chose to focus primarily on Palestinian writers.
HZ: And Erik Agard contributed a crossword concentrating on Palestinian films.
ADRIAN JOHNSON: The most common ways you'll see the Palestinian culture represented are through writing poetry, novels, documentarians, scholarship and through food. But we also have plenty of other different ways that we've brought things in. One of our puzzles has the entry ‘scarab’: so normally the most common way you hear about a scarab beetle is it's an old ancient beetle of great importance to the Egyptians the ancient Egyptians. What you may not know is there is a superhero called the Scarlet Scarab, and that actually kind of centers Arab female identity in almost a pop culture sense.
And we did have a couple of Palestinians look over every puzzle, like to just fact check for cultural accuracy. And there are plenty of Palestinian people that really, really like crossword puzzles. We didn't necessarily do it for Palestinians, because they already know their stories and their truths, they didn't need us to tell these stories; but we felt an opportunity to use our creative medium to incorporate them into a space where Palestinian voices are at a premium, if they exist at all.
ERIK AGARD: Puzzles are a space where I mean, there's there's limitations on it, but it is a space where you can talk to people and advance certain things.
HZ: When I was interviewing the guests for this episode, every one of them namechecked Nate Cardin, who in 2018 was one of the people who launched Queer Qrosswords, the fundraising pack of queer-themed crosswords by queer creators that has raised tens of thousands of dollars for LGBTQIA+ charities.
RACHEL FABI: After Queer Qrosswords, I think the Overton window shifted on what could be in a crossword puzzle, and last year, ‘gay porn’ was in the New York Times, like as an entry.
HZ: Wow! Great.
RACHEL FABI: Yeah, it's something that I never thought I would see. And it's happening so quickly, because as younger and more inclusive constructors get their puzzles published, it changes what's acceptable. I think the younger generation, the Gen Z constructors, the millennial constructors, who are putting these things in their puzzles are pushing older constructors to expand the kinds of puzzles they've made, and to really look at who their imagined average solver is, and try to shake that up.
HZ: It's really exciting.
RACHEL FABI: It is really exciting. It's a fun time to be in crosswords.
My name is Rachel Fabi. By day I'm a professor of bioethics at a medical school in New York state. And then when I'm not doing that, I'm also a crossword constructor and editor. I've been constructing since 2019, and I run the crossword puzzle fundraiser called These Puzzles Fund Abortion.
ADRIAN JOHNSON: I was hugely inspired by her work, actually. I really like Erik's puzzles a lot, and he and Rachel were both probably two of the biggest inspirations to starting the Puzzles for Palestine project.
ERIK AGARD: These Puzzles Fund Abortion, which has been, I think, a yearly fundraiser that has been going on for four years now: fantastic puzzles, fantastic editing, and all sorts of constructors just come together and donate puzzles to these efforts. And it's just it's some of the best work that you can find out there, and it's also for a good cause.
RACHEL FABI: Thank you. We're very proud of them. We put a lot of time and effort into them and, and testing and editing and it's sort of a six month long process getting these puzzles from start to finish. We have over 50 people involved in this process, which is why it takes so long. It's about forty puzzle-makers and then an additional like fifteen test solvers.
HZ: Tell me how These Puzzles Fund Abortion got started.
RACHEL FABI: I did my PhD in bioethics in Baltimore, and at the time I was good friends with the president of the Baltimore Abortion Fund. And she reached out to me and said, "Hey, we're doing our annual fundraiser. It's called Fundathon. And I had the thought that maybe you could make a puzzle for us and we can offer that as a prize for fundraising," and I was like, "Yeah, I'm happy to make you a puzzle." And I made just like a small, one-off puzzle and they raised, I think like $900 with that one puzzle.
And then the next year, she asked me if I would do it again and I said, "I can do you one better." Having seen the success of Queer Qrosswords and other charity packs, I was like, “I think I could do that.” And I pulled together a bunch of my friends and we made a pack of fourteen or fifteen puzzles. And we sort of did our own fundraiser for the Baltimore Abortion Fund, and we raised about $35,000 in that first year, which blew my mind - I mean, I really thought we would maybe get like $4,000 if we were lucky. But the crossword community really came together and chipped in and supported this cause.
And so we were like, wow, “I guess we have to keep doing this, right?” Because if it worked once and we stopped when the need is still there, it's hard to justify stopping. So the next year we did it agai; I brought on a couple of my friends, Brooke Husic and my friend C.L. Rimkus, and the three of us solicited and edited another pack - this was in 2022 now, that made like $70,000 because the Dobbs Decision leaked in the middle of our fundraising, so the donations basically doubled overnight. And so we've kept doing it since then. And, they tell a story, they have a message and they're still fun, right? Like it's not bleak, and it's really celebrating reproductive rights and reproductive justice.
And there's, I think, a good overlap between people who solve crosswords and people who support progressive causes. I don't think that that's a one to one - I certainly get complaints from people who don't share those values. But I think people who solve crosswords are, in general, curious about the world around them, which leads to wanting to engage with progressive causes. And so it's a good pairing.
ERIK AGARD: I started constructing in maybe like 2012. I was in high school. And when I was first starting out, the thing that I wanted most was just to get a puzzle in the New York Times, and I probably sent them fifteen puzzles before I got an acceptance. And I think at any point during that time, if you had like handed me an answer key and said, “This is what you need to do to get a New York Times published,” I would have just done it, whatever it was. And it wasn't until a few years later that I started... so in 2017, actually, I was at a rally, and I saw a speaker named Aaryn Lang. She got up and she said, "Hey everybody, y'all feeling good?" And everyone, you know, cheered and clapped and everything. She said, "That's too bad," and just proceeded to like drag everybody for five minutes and just talked about how she had been out there years ago saying the same things, absolutely nothing had changed; and basically said, like, everybody here contributes in some way to the harm of somebody else in the world, and we need to interrogate that, navigate based on that, and actually start doing things.
And that's one of a few moments that I can point to of just really shifting how I saw the world and also getting me to start thinking about every aspect of life as relating to, I dunno, everything else. And so I think it was around that time that I started looking at crossword creation more critically and thinking about, okay, what's going on in the industry? Who doesn't have a seat at the table here? What is my intention in making puzzles? If I'm just making whatever puzzles I feel like making, or making whatever puzzles I think that editors are going to like at the New York Times or wherever else, who am I serving? Who am I like maybe passively screwing over? I do fundamentally think that crosswords should be a fun diversion more than anything else, but I also think that right now, we're not yet to a point where they're fun for everybody to solve, and I think people, especially constructors and editors, need to understand that we're not going to get to that point without concerted effort.
HZ: Juliana Pache of BlackCrossword.com:
JULIANA PACHE: I do think that there have been efforts to diversify. It does seem like it's starting to change for sure. In mini crossword puzzles, which tend to be a little bit more modern, you'll see more of that, more POC- and Black culture-related clues might be in there. I do think that it's starting to shift.
ERIK AGARD: I had a puzzle, I think last year, in the New York Times, that somebody said was the Blackest New York Times crossword on record. And I was both like, “This is the highest compliment you could give me, and also I hope someone breaks my record.” And somebody said that we put their pronouns in a puzzle and they hadn't seen it before, and that was just like - I mean, wild, but also great.
HZ: As well as doing These Puzzles Fund Abortion, Rachel Fabi is the crossword editor for Autostraddle, the online magazine for queer women and nonbinary people.
RACHEL FABI: Yeah, so that's something that I've been doing for the last two years, and it has been so satisfying. It's four puzzles a week, three minis, and a midi size, and they're all aimed at and created by queer women, nonbinary people, people who are readers of Autostraddle. And so the commenters who come into these puzzles say things like, "I never knew I could solve a puzzle. I had no idea I was good at crosswords. And now I know, right? Like, it's not me. It's the puzzles I've been solving." And it's so gratifying to see people come into this space that they felt was not for them and realize it could be. And it really is just a question of intent on the creator side. And so to get to contribute to that has been really rewarding.
HZ: Erik, how much stuff can you get into a puzzle that people would deem to be politics or activism?
ERIK AGARD: It's tough because - and this is something I'm like trying to get better at navigating as a constructor, because in, in most crossword outlets, you can't editorialize. So, I can't make a clue that says, like, "Vote for [whoever]". Different places have different lines for what is editorializing, and I think that there are some places where you can do a clue that says 'Black Lives Matter', and others where you probably can't. And, I mean, different people think different things are political or not. Personally, there's no level on which I feel this is controversial, but I've been really excited to have answers like 'gender euphoria' in New York Times puzzles and just have people see that and hopefully feel seen by that. And I think there are people who try to politicize that.
RACHEL FABI: We get asked from time to time, "Why do you call this pack 'These Puzzles Fund Abortion'? Why not say 'Puzzles for reproductive rights' or 'Puzzles for women's health'?” But we're very clear that the purpose of the puzzles is to fund abortion, right? We want people to know that that's where their money's going. But we also think that abortion is often stigmatized and it shouldn't be. There's nothing inherently bad or wrong with abortion. It is like any other health care that you might need. And so by putting it right there in the name, we're hoping to contribute in our own way towards destigmatizing abortion and just being really clear that this is the cause. And if you're not behind it, send your money somewhere else.
HZ: Adrian Johnson, of Puzzles for Palestine:
ADRIAN JOHNSON: These are just games at the end of the day, right? You don't like these games? Turn them off! It's fine. I don't mind. These puzzles aren't for you? Great, that's fine. I never said they had to be.
HZ: You’re not puzzling at gunpoint here!
ADRIAN JOHNSON: Yeah! But the fact that these mundane, seemingly insignificant things can show up in places of extreme extreme power, of extreme courage, of extreme resilience and determination, and put a smile on people's faces: at the end of the day, I've done my job. I'm done. I'm good.
ERIK AGARD: And then there's other things: there was a recent talk by Liz Maynes-Aminzade, one of the New Yorker editors, where she talked about frames and how clues that are like ostensibly neutral can still have frames. For example, just using the phrase 'clean coal', just having that in a grid, no matter how you clue it, advances a certain narrative or position.
HZ: Yeah, it’s quite a propagandist combination.
ERIK AGARD: Right. Increasingly I've been trying as a constructor to find more opportunities to do things like that, because it's very easy for an editor to change your clue. It's harder to change the grid. I think once it's in there, if they've accepted the puzzle - I mean, they can clue it badly, but if it's in there, it's in there.
HZ: Ok, so if you’re making a crossword and you definitely want a message to get through, put it in the answers not the clues.
ERIK AGARD: It's a lot easier when you're working with an editor that you know you can trust to be on the same page and keep your vibe intact. But on the flip side, I've had sort of like neutral answers, like the name of a country, that I've put in a puzzle include in a way that I thought was really cool, and then woke up that morning to see it in the paper and they changed it to something colonialist or whatever. When that's the case, you learn to be more tactical about what you put in your grids, especially.
I don't know if people know how much effort it takes as a constructor to do that because there are so many random ass constraints already. You're working with all these different boxes and then adding a little extra discomfort of, okay, how can I also make this say something or do something? But I think it's something really rewarding to do and rewarding for solvers, and I would love to see more of that from more constructors.
ADRIAN JOHNSON: Your journey doesn't end on a crossword puzzle. It's on all of us to use them as our own catapults and catalysts to starting our own learning journeys.
HZ: Any advice you'd give people who want to make puzzles with a purpose?
RACHEL FABI: Yeah, I think the most impactful thing that we've done, the reason that we've been able to have the kind of fundraising success that we have is because we've partnered with organizations that are already doing this work. The puzzle makers that I work with all care very deeply about this cause, but we don't have the knowledge or the skills to provide abortions or to help people get from point A to point B to get an abortion. That's not something that we know how to do or could do safely. What we know how to do is make puzzles, and we can turn those puzzles into money for people who do know how to do those things. And so partnering with the National Network of Abortion Funds, partnering with the Baltimore Abortion Fund, having those partnerships has been so crucial because it legitimizes what we're doing - those are recognizable names of organizations - and it takes the pressure off of us to try to solve problems that we don't know how to solve. And it lets us just solve the problem we do know how to solve, which is how do we make crossword puzzles?
HZ: Unless you make it so difficult that you can't even solve your own clue.
RACHEL FABI: I have had that experience, actually. I've gone back and solved my own puzzles years later and been like, "What was... what is the answer here?" My puzzle amnesia is really strong.
HZ: No, maybe you're just too good.
RACHEL FABI: That could be it. But I'm skeptical.
HZ: That was Rachel Fabi of These Puzzles Fund Abortion - the fourth pack of puzzles is available now at abortionpuzzles.com, and if you donate more than $50, you get the three previous packs as well; that’s seventy puzzles!
You also heard from Juliana Pache of BlackCrossword.com, a free daily mini puzzle emphasising terms and clues from Black Culture, and the Black Crossword book with 100 new puzzles will be out in August 2024, go preorder it! I do Black Crossword every evening before I go to bed. If I can complete it in under a minute, I feel very pleased. This week I hit my personal best solve time: 39 seconds.
Adrian Johnson is one of the organisers of Puzzles for Palestine; go to PuzzlesForPalestine.com to find out how to get this pack of top notch puzzles.
And Erik Agard is a crossword constructor for outlets including the New Yorker, and all round crossword legend. He also started the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory, a Facebook group where people from marginalized groups who want to learn to make puzzles can go for mentorship and other resources; I’ll link to that and all the guests’ puzzles at theallusionist.org/grids.
HZ: See you in seven years.
ERIK AGARD: Sounds great.
HZ: Bye.
News for you if you live in or around Vancouver BC: a bunch of us are going to hang out in real life, on 25 May, 10am-12pm at Trout Lake. We can get some snacks from the farmers’ market then eat them in the shade of a tree. I’ll make a little Allusionist logo flag or something so you can find us - or just follow the sound of my voice, that’s usually how people track me down. It’ll be very nice; we don’t often get to hang out in person with the people who listen to the same podcasts we do. Unless you’re all gathering in the village hall to listen en masse, and nobody told me.
We do hang out online a lot in the Allusioverse Discord, which is one of the perks for those of you who donate to the show via theallusionist.org/donate and in return for keeping this lil bit of independent media afloat, you also get the behind the scenes scoop about the making of every episode - my friends who read these scoops seem to relish the fever dream quality they sometimes have - you get fortnightly livestreams with relaxing readings from my ever-expanding collection of reference books, and the aforementioned Discord where this week we have chatted about such things as pen nibs and recording techniques and the etymology of apricot. Join us: go to theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
marcescent, adjective, botany: (of leaves or fronds) withering but remaining attached to the stem.
Try using ‘marcescent’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The music and editorial assistance is by Martin Austwick of PaleBirdMusic.com. Thanks to Olivia Mitra Framke.
Our ad partner is Multitude. If you want to advertise on this show, and hear me come up with an original ad for your product every time, contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads.
Find @allusionistshow on the social networks. And you can hear or read every episode, get links to all the guests you heard from and their various puzzles and more information about the topics, and suggestions for otherlusionists that might be pertinent to this one, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and links to any events that are coming up, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
