From Michelle Mercer's book "Will You Take Me As I Am", Joni is quoted as saying:

"I've been reading Emily Carr, who I love . . . I love her . . . It so helps to find a writer whose style I love and maybe it's because she's a painter but she . . . I've read a lot of great writers and I go 'Oh, this is a great writer,' but I don't love it. I can't explain it, it's just the way Emily Carr creates a sentence . . . they're like a songwriter's sentence, she's extremely gifted at condensing a lot into a very small space. She visually saturates her sentences in a way that's beyond compare to me. It's not so much that it's psychological . . . she just lets you see what she's seeing and lets the psychology take place."