Title: In All Directions
Prompt: The meta answer is a literary location which should appear as a clue in this puzzle but does not.
Answer: EAST EGG (from The Great Gatsby)
Skip to the bottom for BONUS PUZZLE instructions!
Explanation of May’s contest: Seven entries are clued using a direction which corresponds to their position in the grid: 17A ALLEY clued as [Northwest passage?], 8D VEGA clued as [North star?], 16A EXPO clued as [Northeast conference?], 44A WOOLF clued as [West Virginia?], 65A AREA clued as [Southwest territory?], 69A TURN clued as [South bend?] and 62D PIKE clued as [Southeast freeway?]
There’s one missing: East. Looking at the “east” section of the grid, 38D OVUM is clued as [Reproductive cell], but could be clued as [East egg?] to round out the set, making EAST EGG the contest answer.
East Egg is the fictional Long Island home of the “old money” families in The Great Gatsby (in contrast to West Egg, home of the “new money”). This contest was almost certainly easier if you were familiar with this book, although Google could still probably get you there even if you weren’t. Several people pointed out the puzzle’s timeliness, given that this year is the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby. April 10, 1925, was the publication date, to be specific, so this contest is a month late but pretty close! Fun fact though: nothing about The Great Gatsby had anything to do with inspiring this puzzle. I constructed this puzzle last August and didn’t realize that 2025 was the 100th anniversary until just a couple months ago. No, the inspiration for this puzzle was that one of the songs that on any given day has a non-zero chance of being stuck in my head is, for reasons I do not understand, Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” (no, I am not Canadian), and I wanted to construct a puzzle where I could use that phrase as a clue. A happy coincidence that this led to a mechanism where EAST EGG fit as an answer.
There were 74 correct answers and 10 incorrect submissions this month, making for a record 84 total contest submissions and tying the record set in March for most correct answers. A big turnout for East of Eden by John Steinbeck among the incorrect answers. Close, but there’s no entry in the “east” section of the grid that could be clued this way, whereas 38D OVUM could be clued as [East egg?], as suggested by the prompt.
Congratulations to this month’s randomly chosen winner: Eric Maddy of Huntington Beach, CA! The prize this month (as it is every month) is a copy of a thematically apt novel embossed with FROM THE LIBRARY OF ARIADNE. I thought just going with The Great Gatsby would be a bit anticlimactic, so this month the prize is The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck. As in past months I was inspired by the incorrect submissions when choosing the prize, but whereas Gatsby would be anticlimactic, East of Eden seemed like it would just be cruel (it’s over 600 pages), so I found myself having to think outside the box. Funnily enough, The Winter of Our Discontent, like Gatsby, takes place on Long Island, so it ties in both with the contest answer (by location) and with the most popular wrong answer (by author) and thus felt like an appropriate choice. Congratulations, Eric!
You can read Ben Chenoweth’s blog post about this month’s contest over at Crossword Fiend, where you can also leave a comment and rate the puzzle (if you leave a comment first).
Dubious Honors
This month’s Tick-Tock Award, which is awarded to the solver whose submission I received first, goes to Hannah B., whose answer came in at 9:22 AM EDT on May 1. The White Rabbit Award, which is awarded to the solver whose submission I received last, goes to Mike B., whose answer came in truly right under the wire at 11:58 PM EDT on May 8. I have no actual prizes to hand out to these solvers, they just get the satisfaction of BOOKending this month’s contest. Well done!
Can you beat their times next month??
More to Explore
I want to draw your attention to some other excellent contest crosswords created by women which you may want to check out: Lydia Roth and Christina Bodensiek continue their spring 2025 series of weekly metas Sundays at noon on their Crosshare page, and you can chat about the puzzles (no spoilers until after the deadline) over on the XWord Muggles Forum. Speaking of Crosshare, Rose Sloan and Alex Boisvert published “You Would Have Done The Same” over on Rose’s Crosshare page a couple weeks ago – another meta well worth checking out!
If you know of any other meta/contest crosswords constructed or co-constructed by women or woman-aligned constructors that I should shout-out, please send links to those puzzles to damefoxwords@gmail.com and I’ll mention them in next month’s solution write-up.
JANUARY-MAY 2025 BONUS PUZZLE
Surprise! I’ve got an extra puzzle for you using all five of the previous contests. There is no additional crossword grid to fill in for this puzzle, just a prompt: The answer to the bonus puzzle is a type of book.
Those of you familiar with the Muller Monthly Music Meta might be put in mind of the “mega meta” that runs through all twelve of those contest puzzles in a given calendar year. Same idea, but I’m not Pete Muller, so I’m not going to try to do this with a year’s worth of puzzles. Every few months though, I may have an extra prompt for you. The incentive to solve these bonus puzzles is a little different from the monthly contests: there is no prize drawing, but if you solve a bonus puzzle, you get an extra entry in the prize drawing for next month’s contest, as long as you also solve that contest. So this time, if you solve this bonus puzzle in May and then you also solve June’s contest, you get two entries in the prize drawing in June, but if you solve this bonus puzzle and then don’t solve June’s contest, you get zero entries in June’s prize drawing. (If you don’t solve this bonus puzzle and then you solve June’s contest, you get one entry in June’s prize drawing, same as usual.) Make sense?
To submit to the contest, send an email with your answer in the subject line to damefoxwords@gmail.com. The contest deadline is 11:59pm Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, May 12 (yes, you just get two days). The correct answer will be published with June’s contest on June 1. Since this is the first one, I’ll give you a hint: don’t overthink it. Truly do not. Are you thinking about it? You’re thinking too hard.
Thank you to everyone who solved this month’s contest! Good luck on the bonus puzzle, and I’ll see you in June!
Ex libris Ariadne
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