THE TWO QUOTATIONS above are reflections on the creative process. Plato sug-gests that inspiration comes from somewhere outside the poet, that an external, divine force speaks through the singer so that he is “out of his senses” and “the mind is no longer in him.” Alice Walker writes from a perspective during the process of writing, implying that literary characters gain their own autonomy and function outside of the overt control of their authors. They leave the page and take on an existence that is sepa-rated from the conscious mind of the author: her characters can come to see her and talk to her; their perspectives are different from hers. Both Plato and Walker understand cre-ativity as something that seems to operate not only within, but also outside of the artist. In Alisoun Sings, Caroline Bergvall reconstructs her own creative process in a way that is reminiscent of both of these models. It focuses on the idea of an external inspiration for which the author must wait, and also foregrounds the concept that literary characters can escape from their texts and have lives of their own. In my meditation on Alisoun as a character, I want to explore what it means to think about creation and character in this way, focusing on how this particular character—Chaucer’s Alison of Bath—has worked on and with authors across time.

At the beginning of Alisoun Sings, Caroline Bergvall describes her creative process, as she calls a name, a name that calls up a “network of resonance” (vii).