The Devil & Daisy Dirt at NBPAC on Nov. 8
Alex Dawson and the devil in a scene from "The Devil and Daisy Dirt."
The performer who visited a recent Rutgers creative writing class began by snapping a mousetrap on his tongue.
The man, a carnival entertainer known as a human blockhead, progressed to closing a mink trap on his finger and then a wolf trap on his hand.
Tension mounted as the professor, Alex Dawson, told students to expect a hair-raising finale. He passed around a heavy wooden box, belted with leather straps, labelled: “Bear Trap.”
“A bear trap is banned in almost every state,” Dawson informed his students. “It’s the only serrated trap. It exerts 500 pounds of pressure. It doesn’t just lacerate the leg or break the bone; it pulverizes the muscle and blood vessels.”
The students sat riveted.
Alex Dawson's Worry 101 and Wonder 101 focus on horror and fantasy writing.The case was finally opened with great fanfare.
And inside was…no bear trap. Just a large cobblestone paver.
“This is what I want you to do with your writing,” Dawson told the stunned students. “The witnessing of the three smaller traps created credibility, and that escalation had you believing in the promise of the final feat, impossible though it is.”
The performance was a lesson in “how to write the kind of suspense that will keep your readers from ever putting down your book,” Dawson said at the start of the class.
And Dawson knows what he’s talking about.
His play, "The Devil and Daisy Dirt," comes to the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center Nov. 8 for its 50th and final performance after touring the state for over a year. A cover story in Weird New Jersey called it "the most original, Jersey-centric and downright weird presentation in our state's theatrical history."
Meanwhile, Dawson’s first novel, "Welcome to the White Hart," which author Lev Grossman blurbed as “Narnia by way of Faulkner,” is set to be published in 2026.
Dawson, a burly, gray-bearded motorcycle enthusiast raised on an Alabama horse ranch, was recently described by the Asbury Park Press as “something of a Jersey legend himself.”
His courses—which he calls "Worry 101” and “Wonder 101” — draw scores of undergraduates dedicated to writing horror, suspense, and fantasy fiction.
Dawson’s Study Abroad programs, like last summer’s “Things Terrible and Unguessable: Write Ghost Stories in Haunted England,” fill to capacity every year.
A classroom lesson in writing suspense featured J.R. Whitcomb, the human blockhead.During one recent class on the third floor of Murray Hall, Dawson showed an easy rapport with his students. Snacks were distributed, and folk and outlaw country music played from a sound system as he prepared for the day’s lesson.
“Joyful effort, that’s the key,” says Dawson, a 1993 graduate of Rutgers College and an assistant teaching professor in the Department of English, School of Arts and Sciences. “It’s never about the promise or the threat of a good or bad grade. It’s can I get them excited enough about what they’re doing so they continue working on it over winter and summer break?”
Students say Dawson’s teaching has an empowering and clarifying impact that helps them develop into self-assured writers.
Michaela Schwab, a 2024 graduate who majored in astrophysics, said she came into Wonder 101 thinking she should be composing high-end literary pieces. But her real passion was for science fiction and fantasy.
“Alex flipped that on its head and asked me, ‘what made you like reading books?” Schwab said. “And I was like ‘oh, dragons.’
“And he said, ‘what if you had fun with your writing?’’
Schwab went on to do an independent study under Dawson that culminated in a night of storytelling — “Extragalactic: Tall Tales of Deep Space” — that took place at the Physics Lecture Hall with both science and humanities faculty and students participating.
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Alex Dawson's Study Abroad trips to haunted locales are a hit with Rutgers students.We had the science side of Rutgers and the English department reaching across the divide,” said Schwab, who continues to write stories as she pursues graduate studies in astrophysics at the University of Virginia. “That was one of the best experiences I had at Rutgers.”
Born in New Jersey, Dawson moved to Alabama at the age of nine, with a mom, who believed in witches, and a stepdad, who owned a horse ranch. He developed his taste for what he calls the “dark fantastic” listening to his mom’s ghost stories and watching the creature features of the day, like “Gremlins” and “The Fly.”
“My stories aren’t really scary, they’re just very strange,” he said. “My goal is never to scare somebody. My goal is to plunge somebody into a weird world.”
That could well apply to "The Devil and Daisy Dirt," which Dawson has described as a “bluegrass E.T.” or “a folk horror fairy tale with live music and an 8’ puppet.” A poignant and pithy take on the myth of the Jersey Devil, the play has been performed in venues that range from barns to traditional theaters, including a free show in Kirkpatrick Chapel at Rutgers that drew over 200 students.
Dawson says the play is less about the devil than it is about Daisy Dirt, a waitress at a Pine Barrens diner called Lucille's Luncheonette who eventually makes a stand against villainous men.
“This is really a story about female empowerment,” he said.
The play and his forthcoming novel mark new heights in a career that has already been colorful and eclectic. Dawson ran a much-loved used bookstore and cultural hub, The Raconteur, in Metuchen, worked as a bouncer and a weekend bartender in “some of the roughest gutbuckets in New Jersey,” and served as resident playwright for a Manhattan theater company.
Teaching continues to hold a special place in his life.
That was clear during the recent class that featured his friend, Dr. J.R. Whitcomb, the Human Blockhead.
Alex Dawson built a mobile book store on the back of a flat bed farm truck. The vehicle is equipped with two stages for student readings.But Dawson invests every class with similar animating spirit. And he concludes every semester by having his students read their work before a crowd of total strangers at the Highland Park Farmer’s Market. The readings take place at The Rac-On-Tour, a mobile bookshop he built on the back of flatbed farm truck, which has two stages.
“I like having them put their work in a place where a stranger can encounter it,” he said. “Being published isn’t the goal. Being read (or heard) is the goal. The mark of a writer, I think, is that at least one person you don’t know has read or heard your work.”
At the farmer’s market, Dawson brings the semester to a ceremonial close by putting a new twist on the William Butler Yeats quote.
“Education is not the filling of a pail,” Dawson declares at the event, throwing up an old mop bucket, which lands with a loud clunk in the gravel lot.
And when he says, “It’s the lighting of a fire,” Dawson points to another one of his sideshow friends, this time a fire-spitter, who then upchucks a 20-foot plume of bright red flame.
“What I can teach them during the semester is minimal,” Dawson said. “But if I can get them started on a journey that has them writing and reading for the next 10 years, well, then that’s how they’ll become great.”