Not long ago, Kate Chin Park did not believe she was capable of completing a crossword puzzle. It wasn’t that Chin Park didn’t think she was smart enough, just that her brain didn’t quite work that way. “It’s not that I didn’t think that I was smart—I knew I was smart. I was just like, Whatever it is that makes someone good at solving crosswords, I don’t have it,” she says. But she was long-term friends—and then partners—with a competitive puzzler, and with some encouragement, she caught the bug. Now she and fellow constructor Rebecca Goldstein have created and launched Westwords, the West’s only crossword puzzle tournament, coming June 23 to Berkeley.
This essay was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday. To keep reading, become an Alta Journal member for as little as $3 a month.
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Chin Park and Goldstein, who creates crossword puzzles for Alta Journal, met in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic through the community of Crossword Twitter. As Goldstein puts it, she had “lots of extra free time, kinda driving my wife crazy.” Her wife told her: “‘You solve that thing every day. Why don’t you try to make one?’”
As pandemic restrictions began to lift, Goldstein met the thriving—yet almost entirely online—crossword community in the Bay Area, since most opportunities for meetups or formal tournaments were centered around the East Coast, particularly in the New York area.
The gold standard of puzzle gatherings, for many, is the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT), an annual springtime tournament hosted for over 40 years by New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz in Stamford, Connecticut. The event costs a minimum of $230 to compete in and sells out the Stamford Marriott, making it an exciting—albeit intense—pilgrimage for constructors and solvers. The distance and lodging costs can make it inaccessible for puzzlers and constructors from other parts of the country, the grand majority of whom are amateurs with day jobs. Goldstein and Chin Park both made the trip out in April of this year, but they had already begun preparations for their own tournament, which will take a more “indie” approach.
“Somebody tweeted something like, ‘My kingdom for a West Coast tournament,’” recalls Goldstein. “And I remember taking a screenshot of it and sending it to Kate and being like, ‘We’re doing the Lord’s work. This is very important. This is going to happen.’”
Indie tournaments, as compared with more-established events, are cheaper, but they can also make room for some of the fun and playfulness that ACPT shuns. “There will be a few clues that have profanity in them, or a couple risqué jokes,” Chin Park says, marking a deviation from the puzzles she edits day-to-day as crossword editor for the New Yorker.
For Westwords, Chin Park says, “I’m trying to allow for more of the crossword constructors’ individual voices to come through.” Much of the inspiration and structural support for Westwords comes from the Boston-area indie crossword tournament Boswords, which was created in 2017 and is codirected by John Leib.
All tournaments, ultimately, are about building community as well as competition. Crossword celebrities like Paolo Pasco, Tyler Hinman (a.k.a. That Puzzle Guy), and speed-solver Dan Feyer will compete either remotely or in person, though the seven puzzles created specifically for the tournament range in difficulty and are top secret until the day of the event. The real emphasis here is on creating a supportive gathering space for a community that already exists and is growing. “It’s very homey. It’s like my people,” Goldstein says. “People are just super, super friendly. Everyone’s into the same niche, weirdo thing. We’re here for the same specific reason. You can lean all the way into it.”
Rafael Musa, a crossword constructor who collaborates frequently with Goldstein and creates puzzles for Alta, has contributed one of the seven puzzles for the tournament and will be there in person. “It’s rare that you’ll be in a space where everyone is really into crossword puzzles in your day-to-day life,” says Musa. “There is a critical mass of people here, and there is the demand for something like this.”
Another indie tournament is already in the works in Chicago. “It’s catching on,” Goldstein says.•
Westwords Crossword Tournament will take place on June 23 at Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley. Masks are required indoors. The tournament is also available online. Learn more.
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
