Author Deborah Diesen who has a blog called Jumping The Candlestick, interviewed Four Way Books' author, Eileen Pollack for "Michigander Monday".
"Breaking and Entering is my second published novel and my first book set in Michigan. Just after I moved here, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and stories about the Michigan Militia were all over the national media. I was fascinated to learn about the far rightwing views of many militia members, and equally interested in the conservatism and fundamentalism of other residents of my new state. I spent a day as a visiting writer in a public school to the west of Ann Arbor and was stunned to find out that most of the biology teachers were creationists. And yet here were my husband and his coworkers in Ann Arbor studying genetics, believing as deeply in evolution as their fellow Michiganders believed in creationism. I grew close to a friend living in a town where the minister was making vitriolic anti-Semitic sermons every Sunday. Her husband, who is Jewish, protested the sermons, and their children began to be harassed. Soon afterward, their house burned down. My friend was pretty sure that she and her family had been burned out on purpose; the town fire marshall, in fact, found evidence of arson, but he accused them of burning down their own house to collect the insurance. All that gave me an idea for a book--a book in which I tried to figure out how people so different from one another could all be Michiganders, could all be Americans, and how we could ever hope to make a democracy work with citizens who felt so passionately about such disparate beliefs."
