Actor Nick Offerman and New York Times puzzle editor Christina Iverson co-wrote a crossword about woodworking.
By Jane Burns
Next week is a busy one for Nick Offerman. The TV star has a book coming out Oct. 14, the same day he’ll be in Des Moines for an event at Franklin Event Center hosted by Beaverdale Books. The next day, a crossword puzzle he co-authored is set to appear in the New York Times.
And through all of that runs an Iowa thread most people probably haven’t got a clue about.
Offerman, best known for his role as grumpy, mustachioed Ron Swanson in “Parks and Recreation,” created the full-size puzzle with New York Times digital puzzle editor Christina Iverson, who lives in Ames.
“It was really fun,” Iverson said. Offerman “was really enthusiastic about every step of it. He was really involved and wanted to learn how it works.”
Iverson plans to attend the Oct. 14 book event, too. She said the puzzle she and Offerman constructed has a woodworking theme, just like his book: “Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Fools and Tomfoolery.”
Iverson took a unique route to become a puzzle editor. She had never even solved a crossword puzzle before, much less created or edited one, until becoming a stay-at-home mom in 2018. She and her husband, Joey, started solving puzzles together because, unlike movies, they could easily pause them when the baby needed attention.
She quickly became obsessed, then tried constructing her own puzzles. She submitted her first puzzle to the Times in November 2018, connected with a mentor in early 2019 and got her first puzzle accepted by the Times in May 2019. When others weren’t, she sent them to the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times or Universal syndicate. “Some people focus so much on the New York Times, and if a puzzle gets rejected, they just throw it out,” she said.
Her persistence paid off. The Los Angeles Times asked her to become assistant to the puzzle editor in early 2022, and that summer, the New York Times invited her to fill in for an editor on paternity leave. “I felt it would be sort of stupid not to take it,” she said.
Three years later, she’s a full-time member of the New York Times puzzle staff. Her primary job is to edit The Crossword, the Times’ main, large puzzle but she also sometimes works on The Mini (a smaller crossword) and Strands (a version of a word search). Iverson usually reviews about 100 submissions for the main crossword every week, tweaking clues to fit Times style and refining the puzzle themes, which help submissions rise to the top of the stack.
“The hardest thing to do is to come up with a theme that is original,” she said. “It’s hard to find an idea that really makes your puzzle jump out.”
She said Offerman’s theme was pretty easy to fine-tune, especially since he is an experienced carpenter and owns a woodshop in Los Angeles.
Iverson is also working with documentarian Ken Burns on a puzzle that will coincide with the Nov. 16 premiere of his PBS series, “The American Revolution.”
Making puzzles at all, much less with celebrities, goes far beyond what Iverson imagined as a stay-at-home mom with a new baby and a new obsession.
As she put it, “It’s my dream job that I didn’t know existed.”
Nick Offerman’s visit to Franklin Event Center starts at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 14 and is hosted by Beaverdale Books. Tickets range from $40 to $55 and come with one pre-signed book.
