Sara Probst and Courtney D. Williams met in the summer of 2001 at The New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.  They spent two summers in common there, reading, writing, workshopping, happy houring, learning not to be “Oprahic,” and “doing voices.”  In 2002, they decided they’d been workshopped to death and decided to hit the road the next summer instead.

Courtney D. Williams

For a year after the trip, Courtney kept Captain America on the dashboard, a four-inch insistence that “the trip will never end.”  But Courtney spent the next eight years planted all too firmly at various desks in various marketing departments, instead of in the driver’s seat of a tightly-packed car headed west.  The novel she began on the road remains unfinished.   But she never forgot the lull of rubber on asphalt or the sights and sounds and ideas and inspirations she found on the road, and she spent most of her time at those desks daydreaming about how to get back to those ideas and that inspiration.  And crying.  A lot.

In early 2011, she left the corporate world and began freelancing as a marketing copywriter, a first step on the slow circle back to fiction and freedom, at least in theory.   She has written everything from inserts for cosmetics samples distributed at the Emmys to advertising copy for funeral homes.  Read more about her copywriting services at www.SeventhCloudCreativeSolutions.com.

She lives in the Hudson Valley area of New York with a moody chinchilla named Pablo, and moved Captain America to her desk to keep her on task.  He’s a Facebook Nazi.

Sara Probst (aka, “The Swiss Miss”)

Born and raised in what she likes to call “Swissland”, the granddaughter of an American citizen, Sara has covered 49 US states over the course of at least three road trips in the past ten years.  She claims “at least three” not because she is so very bad at math (she is), but because memory often does not serve her well. To remind her of that one epic trip, however, she still possesses a scrapbook full of episodes that were scribbled down under flashlights in dark tents – diary entries that were supposed to become stories, poems, and essays.  Instead, they became something like a monster of a novel, entitled “The Soft Edges of the Earth”, which has been haunting her to this day and which she is currently, finally, wrapping up.

Like her travel buddy Courtney, Sara was eventually driven into corporate writing jobs.  She has also taught English and worked as a freelance translator.  Having finally realized that even the awesomest business card will ultimately be less cool than a published book, she is now holding down a part-time day job as a business consultant and working on her novel, writing for 73exposures, and starting her own freelance writing and translation service.

Since America still hasn’t handed her an honorary passport, she continues to live in Zurich, Swissland, where she writes, dances salsa, and occasionally falls in love.  In the spirit of the great, great Richard Brautigan, who insisted on finishing a book with the word “Mayonnaise”, she would like nothing more than to end her own novel with her favorite English word, “Miscellaneous”.

Suki Suzuki (aka, “the car”)

Suki Suzuki survived the encounter with the German prince, the one with the flying rock, and the one where her oil dried up in the desert.  Back in Kingston, she finally got an oil change and recovered from the various injuries she had sustained.  Several years after her miraculous recovery, however, Courtney drove her through a flood, and although she was pushed out of the water by two local head-bangers (the incident made the newspaper), it was the beginning of the end.  Months later, a fellow motorist frantically alerted Courtney that she was “trailing flames.”  But nothing would keep Suki down.  Except an engine seize months after she was extinguished.

Courtney swears she has seen Suki with her familiar cracked Suzuki emblem and a new engine in various Kingston, NY parking lots.  She’s glad Suki doesn’t recognize her.  It’s easier that way.

Captain America

Captain America, the plastic patron saint of the trip, returned slightly faded, and with the permanent tack of melted duct tape on his muscle-bound gluteus maximus.  Having spent the entire 16,000 miles riding backwards, he was anxious to stretch his legs, take in some air, and get back in his street clothes.  But Courtney held him hostage on the dash for more than a year in some nostalgic protest.  Finally, he was called upon to keep watch over Courtney’s desk, and all efforts undertaken there.  Occasionally, he is called upon to do battle with the resident stinkbugs.  But usually, he’s just reminding Courtney that no major publishing house has yet to publish a collection of social media posts about procrastinating.