"This book is a marvel of lucidity, grace, and courage. Free Fall entrances and delights while imparting an iconoclastic wisdom, one we so desperately need in these times."

--Kim Dana Kupperman, series editor, The Best American Essays, and founder, Welcome Table Press

"Smith speaks to us from those liminal spaces-between teaching and learning, writing and reading, loving and leaving, freedom and restraint-where voice finds its footing. But what seems at first to be a limen turns out to be a precipice and if we really want to be alive in our writing, it is not enough to stand on the edge. We must, as Free Fall sublimely illustrates, jump." --Suzanne Maria Menghraj, essayist and Clinical Professor of Writing and Critical Creative Production at New York University

"With a wise and winning authenticity, Smith captures the meaning of a fully lived life. In essays, fiction, and poetry, he revisits his nine-decade journey as truth seeker. We happily go along for the ride. Free Fall is a gift of storytelling and late-life reflection on where we've been and what lies ahead." --Mimi Schwartz, author, Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited: New Echoes of My Father's German Village

"Whether writing about leading a class of writing students (or being led by them) into a 'place of not knowing, ' or a poem to his dead son, or about the clear-cutting of trees from a Gettysburg battlefield as if they were the scab on a wound, time and again Smith underscores with bracing clarity how the things least visible to us-time and death-matter most. He is a writer of rare insight, depth, and beauty." --Peter Selgin, author, A Boy's Guide to Outer Space

"Free Fall is the kind of book you want to keep on your bedside table forever. The wise voice weaving through this collection reminds us that it's never too late to change your life. Deeply philosophical and spiritual in surprising ways, Smith's gorgeous writing will inspire you and teach you how and where to find wonder wherever you are." --Marjory Wentworth, author, One River, One Boat: Occasional Poems and Other Stories