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My mother worked for a woman, Maria Ley-Piscator, who with her husband founded the Dramatic Workshop, which was connected to the New School. My mother did proofreading and typing and stuff or her, and as part of her payment, I was able to take acting classes there on Saturdays when I was 10.

Manchester Youth theater, then the National Student Theater Company, and later, my degree course, all helped form my love of telling stories and directing.

It's absolutely crucial that every child-serving organization - be it an elementary school, daycare, or community center - provide its children with time and space to play.

I used to go to school in Manhattan with a bunch of the City Kids.

We had put our son into a little preschool in Los Angeles, and it was just not going well, so we brought him back home. We had every intention of putting him back into a traditional school setting, but we just really couldn't find the right match for him. And then we moved to Georgia and again couldn't find the right match.

As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, young offender's units, youth clubs and housing estates.

I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'

I learned about community organizing from my parents. As a child, their stories were so instructive.

I know plenty of people with kids in elite, private schools and had heard many stories. I have drifted into the homes of some of those very wealthy families in New York and am fascinated with the dynamic and how much freedom the children are given.