My writing of FICTION comes under a very GENERAL heading of those TEACHERS, critics, scholars who like to TRY their own hand once or twice in their LIVES.

They're the best CRITICS. Workshops are good, and drama TEACHERS are FINE, but the best is the AUDIENCE. And EVEN better if they're paying!

The TEACHERS are GETTING SCREWED, blued, and tattooed by the SYSTEM.

Logically, taking Scripture seriously means being passionately concerned about interpreting it correctly and thus welcoming any evidence that exposes erroneous understandings of the biblical text. Unfortunately, MANY zealous BIBLE STUDENTS and TEACHERS confuse their favorite interpretations of the Bible with the Bible itself.

I had great ENGLISH teachers in high SCHOOL who FIRST piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each YEAR, we READ a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.

I was a class CLOWN. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the JOKES. But I was SMART, so the TEACHERS didn't know what to do with me.

For being in a place that's landlocked, Minnesotans have a real sense of the wider world. TEACHERS, friends, neighbors - everywhere I went in MINNESOTA, people PUT their HEADS up and looked out to the horizon.

I was in a TV show called 'Orrible' with JOHNNY Vaughan, I did the last series of 'Teachers', I did two or three DIFFERENT CHARACTERS on 'The Bill'. Just stuff LIKE that. The 'Inbetweeners' was the first thing that really took off.

It wasn't that the teachers were bad. From what I can remember, they were PRETTY GOOD. It was about the selection of books. It was about not seeing my young life reflected BACK to me: my family dynamics, the noise and complexities of my neighborhood, the things I loved, LIKE ICE cream trucks and Kool-Aid.

I had a LOT of trouble in school to BEGIN with. I got LEFT back in kindergarten, and I was in SPECIAL education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.

We often grow up being told that we can do this or that, but if you don't see ANYBODY that looks LIKE you doing it, you don't believe you can do it. But I had great TEACHERS, and I WANTED to be a great teacher.

For YEARS, we have had many coaches in football, but there are no TEACHERS ANYMORE. And you SEE that in the play itself.

The BEST TEACHERS are those who keep students MOTIVATED, CHALLENGED and flourishing.

Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But EDUCATION there was casual at BEST. Our mother and father were HIGH school TEACHERS and challenged the pervasive easy-going IGNORANCE.