Zoe Wheeler has never found puzzles puzzling, which is exactly what you might expect from the New York Times’ youngest female crossword puzzle constructor. However, her affair with crosswords was not quite love at first sight. “I was doing them on and off through high school, but didn’t get really into them until my sophomore year of college, which was also when I started making them.”
Through high school, she was mostly interested in number puzzles: Sudoku and the newborn KenKen puzzles (which are now still a mere three years old). “My family was always really into puzzles,” she says. Her uncle would make copies of KenKen puzzles, which he kept waiting in piles at his house. When Zoe and her cousins came to visit they would snatch them up and race each other to finish them.
Her true love for crosswords was born during a Shakespeare class she took her sophomore year at Scripps University before transferring to Brown. The girl who sat in front of her was “so good at them,” she soon found herself following her lead, doing them in class and peaking over the girl’s shoulder when she got stuck. Soon Zoe found herself printing them out every night before class, packing them with care into her backpack for the next day and mourning the times she forgot to do so.
“I actually talked to the girl one time—she complimented me on my crossword shoes and I complimented her on her… skills.” She laughs. “Don’t print that.” Oops. (Don’t worry— she later assured me that I could, in fact, print that.)
However, by the end of the semester she was submitting five crosswords a week to the New York Times. At that point, she gained the attention of Paula Gamache, a prolific crossword constructor who realized she was a college student from her address and e-mailed her. “She said, ‘I would love to mentor you, there aren’t many women constructing so if you want advice let me know,’” Zoe paraphrases.
Throughout the subsequent winter break, they zipped messages back and forth until on January 19th, 2010, at just 19 years old, one of Zoe’s crosswords was published. “The subject line when they accept you is just “Crossword, dash, yes, exclamation point,” she says. When she first read that subject line, “I just started screaming really loudly. My brother was the only one home and I had trouble speaking for a minute,” she laughs. Since then, there have been two other teenage girls who have published crosswords in the New York Times, including Brown sophomore Aimee Lucido.
Since then, Zoe has had one other crossword published: this past September for the New York Times’ “Brown Week.” All week long they featured crossword puzzles by Brown students Jonah Kagan, Joey Weissbrot, Natan Last, Aimee Lucido and Eshan Mitra as well as Zoe. All of the “Brown Week” participants are also all members of Brown’s Puzzle Club, which meets once a week to decipher codes, discuss construction tactics, and play bananagrams. “It’s a really tight-knit community— as soon as I was published, 20 people Facebook-friended me. Everyone was really nice and welcoming.”
Recently, Brown’s Puzzle Club was invited to a Martha Stewart show on puzzles. Though she expected to remain seated throughout the show, Zoe and the rest of the audience were quickly challenged to complete the three sets of KenKen puzzles strapped beneath their seats. Calling on the skills developed through her years of puzzle-racing with her cousins, she quickly completed them, earning second place and a slot on stage. There she competed against KenKen masters Molly Olonoff and Rob Mackey on live television and though she did not quite win that round, “It was an experience,” she says.
She recently submitted another crossword puzzle to the New York Times and is waiting to hear back. “It’s cool to just construct them, just writing clues… it’s all about thinking about what people will recognize. It’s basically thinking about how people will interpret language.”
WATCH ZOE ON THE SHOW HERE!