Washington Post's Sunday crossword is created in Philly

Evan Birnholz sits in a sunny corner of his Center City brick walk-up and clicks on a 21-square grid that dominates his HP computer screen. He types in names of people with states in them. You know, like Hannah Montana, or Duncan Idaho.

"It's anything that comes to my imagination," says the recently appointed crossword constructor for the Washington Post's Sunday edition - a gig that places him among the elite of newspaper cruciverbalists.

Who would have thought an undergraduate chemistry major who, as a child, struggled to comprehend puns - the meat and potatoes of any crossword - would end up a top puzzle writer?

Not Birnholz.

"I think it's pretty wild," says the 32-year-old with long reddish hair tied in a ponytail, whose debut Post puzzle in his new role appeared Dec. 6.

As a child, he suffered from semantic pragmatic disorder. He often didn't get jokes or idioms. "You take things very literally," he says. He also made odd connections, which made conversations with others difficult. "Someone says A, you say B, but I would have a train of thought that led me to L." Therapy gave him a workaround - one so successful that puns and turns of phrase became his avocation and then vocation.

"Anytime I see or hear a phrase, I'm looking at how many letters it has, can it be turned into something else," says Birnholz. He sold his first crossword only four years ago. His themes might revolve around menu items (humble pie), or the Super Bowl, or animal group names (raft of otters) - really, just about anything.

"I love the wordplay," he says.

As he works on the April 3 grid with the theme "Crossing State Lines," Birnholz notes the across and down answers in a separate file. Later, he will create clever clues, aiming for plays on words or phrases. (Spot checker? (9) Solution: PET SITTER.)

At the moment, though, the goal is to fill in the tiny squares. Besides thinking up folks or fictional characters with states in their names, he places the clues so two state names cross in the puzzle (Montana and Idaho, for example) and so they also border each other on the map so a road tripper would cross from one state to the other.

Once his theme is massaged and wrestled into its squares, he backfills. This being the 21st century, Birnholz uses Autofill to get an idea of what works. It plucks words from a list he has created over the years. Then he goes through the list and looks for an even better word, livelier and more interesting (BALROG, for example). After he writes the clues, his puzzle draft is finished and ready to email to his editor for perusal. The whole process can take days.

Washington Post readers appear to enjoy his efforts. A couple of them may have complained about the increase in pop-culture clues compared to his predecessor - the word wizard Merl Reagle, also the Inquirer's puzzle master, who died in August - but Birnholz says with satisfaction, "I've gotten some very nice letters."

Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten helped select Reagle's replacement. Birnholz was a standout, he says. "His cluing was playful and clever," Weingarten says, "which is in large measure what separates an ordinary puzzle from a great one."

Take the Dec. 27 "Letter Heads" crossword.

"Evan constructed a puzzle as inventively clever as anything I've seen," Weingarten says. The 12 themed answers had two initials in each of them (author H.P. Lovecraft or ER doctor, for example), using all but J and K of the alphabet. Those two letters created the metasolution for an Oscar-winning actor: J.K. Simmons.

"Ingenious, complicated, fair, and it delivered a perfect aha! moment," Weingarten says.

What's Birnholz's favorite clue? One from a 2014 puzzle he did for the New York Times: Series of drug-related offenses? (7). Solution: The Wire, as in the TV show. Get it?

When the Chicago native arrived at Haverford College, he had other aspirations. He was premed. He liked to sing, and joined the Humtones, one of the college's many a cappella groups.

But after graduation, he passed on med school for a master's in public health from Drexel University in 2008 and worked in pharma and research. In 2012, he switched gears again and began a graduate program in history at Temple University, on hold for now.

Over the years, Birnholz had casually tried his hand at crosswords. By the mid-2000s, he could complete the Times Monday puzzle, the week's easiest, as well as the Tuesday and Wednesday ones. "I was not able to solve every day of the week back then," he says.

Now, he tackles a toughie (say, a Saturday Times one) in pencil from his comfy stuffed chair in less than 30 minutes, give or take. This month, he traveled to Stamford, Conn., for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, not looking to win ("I'm not that fast," he says, noting he has buddies who solve his Sunday grids in five minutes flat), but to hang out with his type, because the tournament is "the biggest crossword-nerd gathering." Wife Vicki Jones, a producer at a digital company, accompanied him, even though she doesn't have much patience for crosswords, he says.

In 2006, Birnholz saw the documentary Wordplay, about crossword enthusiasts. He was enthralled by a segment in which Reagle described how he constructs a grid by hand. Birnholz gave it a shot in 2009.

"I failed miserably," he says. But he kept at it.

Birnholz found his eclectic education was a bonus.

Arranging the Humtones' tunes, says Birnholz, was a prelude to arranging crosswords. "A piece of music has a time signature, a rhythm, certain lyrics," says the baritone, who now sings with the Mendelsohn Club of Philadelphia. "And if you change any single one of those, it changes the mood of the entire piece. Crosswords work in a very similar way. You can think of every letter in a puzzle as being a note and every answer as being a musical phrase."

Birnholz even puts organic chemistry from his premed days to use with the occasional element clue or the word enol built into the squares.

In 2012, he debuted in indie puzzler Ben Tausig's Twenty Under Thirty, a collection of crossword puzzles whose makers were all younger than 30. A year later, he appeared in the Times and the Wall Street Journal. In 2014, he began the website Devil Cross that features his originals, and, last year, he cofounded a tournament, Indie 500.

"And, at a certain point, constructing crosswords was no longer just a hobby for me," Birnholz says. "It was what I really loved. So I thought, why shouldn't I make it my career?"

Want to try your hand at Evan Birnholz' crossword? Go to http://games.washingtonpost.com/games/sunday-crossword/

Lkadaba@gmail.com@exinkygal