Laura Braunstein author page

This puzzle's theme was inspired by a text. I was chatting with a friend, and he texted, in response to something I said, "Bears repeating!" So I sent back a row of the "bear face" emoji:

🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻

— bears, repeating. I realized I had a 14-letter phrase, and started looking around for others that began with the criteria "plural animal name that is also a verb."The original grid had BEARS REPEATING (with the clue [Grizzly, panda, grizzly, panda, grizzly, panda?]), along with SEALS WITH A KISS [Pinniped passion?], YAKS ON THE PHONE [Himalayan cattle call?], and the revealer ANIMAL BEHAVIOR.

This was one of the very first puzzles I submitted to the New York Times, almost a year ago. Will and Joel were very encouraging in their feedback and suggested a second draft in which each entry had a prepositional phrase (bye bye BEARS!) and no revealer. I put together a new version (with much help from Erik Agard and John Lieb, both of whom have been fantastic as mentors and collaborators) which was finally accepted. This is my solo debut in the Times; much has happened since I first started constructing, and I feel very fortunate to be part of the crossword community.

LAURA: I've been solving crosswords all my life, it seems — my grandfather, who was an immigrant, would solve puzzles to practice English, and he used to ask for my help when I was a kid. I've only been constructing for about a year. I'm a librarian at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Andrew Kingsley (an NYT constructor), who recently graduated, used to work on his grids in the reference room. We would chat about puzzles, and one day I decided that if puzzles were things that people made, I could make them too.

I've been so fortunate to have friends and mentors who have supported me through the process of learning to construct. Recently, one of my favorite speculative fiction authors, Charlie Jane Anders, tweeted that a definition of success that makes her happy is "getting to be associated with people I admire, who keep surprising me." That is also my definition of success in crosswords. Last winter when I started trying to make puzzles, I never imagined that within a year my first NYT byline would be shared with Erik Agard, whom I admire so much as a constructor and a person.

Erik and I had been looking for ideas for co-constructing, and one day he emailed with this idea about names of body parts hidden in phrases, and thus ensued a 67-message email chain where the idea evolved, first to something with book titles, then to a meta idea, then finally to where it ended up with actor names. Some entries rejected from our final list included JIM [BACK]US, RED [BUTT]ONS, the non-specific M[ORGAN] FREEMAN, and someone with the awesome name of JACK [NOSE]WORTHY, who had a bit part in "Event Horizon."

ERIK: Laura is a true umptuple threat: solver (finished top-100 at Lollapuzzoola in her tournament debut), constructor (wrote a great puzzle for this year's Boswords tournament), blogger (her reviews at Crossword Fiend and Rex Parker usually get a laugh out of me), community pillar (consistently an outspoken advocate for women and other underrepresented groups in crossword construction)... and she's a kickass librarian and probably some other stuff I don't even know about. She's one of those people who can take your one pretty good idea and turn it into three great ideas; it was as much a pleasure to write this puzzle with her as it is a privilege to share her first NYT byline.