Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.
I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.
I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.