![]() Williamson and Kimmel met at freshman orientation, and became fast friends after discovering a mutual love of wordplay. ![]() “Then he’d say, ‘Well, think about it this way,’ and I’d get it.” “He would give me the easy ones to try and figure out, and usually I had no idea,” she says. As a girl she watched him solve Boston Globe puzzles during the week and the New York Times ones on Sundays. “Technically the puzzle was a failure, but I said that getting published was in my achievable future.”įor her part, Williamson was doing crosswords on her own before college, inspired by her father, a devotee who neatly filled in the tiny squares in pen. ![]() “I wrote how cool it was that Will Shortz sent me an email, and that I actually had written my own crossword puzzle,” he says. It was rejected, but he parlayed that “sorry” into an optimistic admissions essay for Tufts. “I really liked it, and then I made the transition to the New York Times, and I realized: ‘I can do this!’”īy age 16, he was restless for a new wordplay challenge, and decided to try writing a puzzle himself. Bored on his long commute up the length of Manhattan from his home in Battery Park to Hunter College High School on East 94th Street, he started doing the puzzles published in the free AM New York newspaper. Kimmel took up crossword puzzles almost by chance. (And it turns out they are not the only Jumbos: Ben Pall, E17, had a crossword puzzle published in the Times for each year he was in high school at the time of his debut, November 23, 2009, he was the youngest New York Times puzzle constructor, at 14 years, 2 months.) A Partnership is Born As Kimmel and Williamson were still just 19, they joined the New York Times’ “teen contributors” list of only 34 people. “It was so cool to see: ‘We’re very interested in your puzzle.’” “I had to read it-how could I not?” he asks. The duo were sitting in a physics lecture earlier this fall when the email they’d been waiting for popped up on Kimmel’s laptop. The result, an homage to summertime Netflix binging, included “Game of Thrones” for MUSICAL CHAIRS, “Walking Dead” for PALLBEARERS and “Mad Men” for PSYCHOPATHS. “But with ‘House of Cards’/HALLMARK STORE, we thought, Yes, that’s a great idea. “Usually what happens is that we don’t think of the clues at the same time as the answers,” says Kimmel. Their first two tries during freshman year had been rejected, but they felt they’d hit their stride with a puzzle built on a theme of hit television shows.Īnd the puzzle had had an auspicious birth, with the first clue, “House of Cards,” leading quickly to the answer HALLMARK STORE. Sophomores Duncan Kimmel and Clara Williamson had high hopes when they mailed their crossword puzzle to the New York Times this summer.
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