e emotional weight of my childhood experiences. I have to keep replenishing. I don't know where it comes from, but whatever it is, I find I need a lot more solitude than I used to, that I have to make a conscious decision to be reclusive and barricade myself. I find I have to make certain commitments to writing that I used to take for granted (Spillman, www.banners/button/map.com).
Erdrich has been influenced as a writer by the fact that her parents and especially her father read to her a great deal, which she thinks has helped give to her works a spoken, oral storytelling quality, as aspect of her writing that was also helped along by the fact that her parents made stories to tell her and each other and her siblings about the small occurrences of everyday life, teaching her that there is a story in the smallest event that can be made interesting if it is told in an interesting way (Spillman, www.banners/button/map.com).
The fact that Erdrich lived in a small town until she was 18 has also affected the structure of her fiction, for she spent her formative years in a place where everyone knew everyone and had always known everyone and the way that anyone would act in a particular situation was easily predicted. People in a small town play parts, and these parts are assigned early on in life and there is very little that one can do as an adult to change the role that one has been assigned to play, and this static ensnaring quality of life in a small town is beautifully captured
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