And so I end up having to make my clues a little easier than I thought I could make them, because you can only be so tricky when you have three words to work with. It’s interesting that working with the print version of the Post puzzles, I have to write more concise than I’m used to being on my website, for space constraints. I guess that would be my style, though I can’t really say. I don’t want to load down my puzzles with really obscure information, or words that don’t really exist anywhere except in crosswords. It may be a tough clue, but it’s actually out there in popular culture-it’s accessible. And when I use the terms smooth and clean, I try to make sure all of my words are either reasonably common or words that people know and use. One thing I try to do is I take a lot of pride in making sure my grids are completely smooth and clean. And I want to make sure any time I try to turn a phrase into a pun that it’s going to be clever or funny. He was very good at taking just about any phrase and turning it into some clever or funny little pun. Have you talked anyone else in the crossword world about that connection? I know Ben Tausig, the editor of American Values Club, is a musicologist. I just think of the crossword as a different kind of art. I don’t think what I’m doing right now is radically different from arranging a piece of music. But even with those constraints, just like in a piece of music, you can still be very creative and innovative with them-they’re just working with different canvases. They’re different but they’re in fact literal barriers, like the size of a grid, the type of words you use, the length of the words you use, where you put the black squares. And I think of crosswords as operating with a similar set of constraints. If you think about a piece of Western music, it has a lot of things that constrain you when you’re putting it together, but they’re the things that we tell ourselves make a piece creative: it has a tempo and rhythm, a time signature, a key signature, if it has lyrics you have to ask if they’re going to rhyme. I sang in an a cappella group and I did a lot of arranging of their music in my last two years there. When I was younger, I played the piano a lot, and I arranged music when I was in college. That’s the bare bones explanation, but I like to think I have a deeper kind of explanation, which comes from a background of doing things in music.Ĭrosswords and music have a lot of similarities. But eventually I got into solving and thought, Why not try to make one? And I of course failed miserably the first time I tried it in January 2009, but I got a lot of practice and kept doing it and eventually got skilled enough and confident enough that I felt like any puzzle I made would turn out O.K. And I would try to help him out, but at a young age I couldn’t really do very much with it. He would solve the New York Times puzzle every day, when I was younger. Birnholz has been making crosswords for about six years, and until recently he published a weekly crossword on his website, Devil Cross. He starts December 6. In a recent phone interview, we discussed what attracted him to puzzles, the link between music and crosswords, and how he imagines he’ll step out of Merl Reagle’s long shadow. Earlier this month, the Post announced that Evan Birnholz, a 32-year-old cruciverbalist who lives in Philadelphia, will take over as the paper’s new crossword constructor. When the crossword constructor Merl Reagle died in August, he left behind a lot of newspaper editors around the country who relied on his weekly syndicated puzzle to fill their back pages. Mr. Reagle was a Falstaffian man known for his inexhaustible wit and playful sensibility, and his 21 by 21 grid was published in dozens of places, including this newspaper and The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine. Evan Birnholz is the new crossword constructor for The Washington Post.
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