Becoming Fearless is an inspirational true story that showcases what is possible when you step out of your comfort zone into the wild. Meet local author, Brenda Smith, and learn all about her adventures through the African wilderness and the inner journey that followed.

About the book: 

Coerced by her boss and fellow river guides, Brenda Smith reluctantly embarks on a rafting trip through a vast Tanzanian game reserve. If she can survive twelve days on the remote jungle rivers, then she must scale Africa’s tallest mountain. After twenty-eight years of a safe and predictable life, Brenda is terrified of what awaits her in these dangerous wildernesses.

She comes face to face with angry hippos, roaring lions, and stealthy crocodiles, and struggles with the extremes of unbearable heat and hypothermia.

Despite the harsh external threats she conquers, her greatest challenge is a profound inner journey—a courageous transformation as she uncovers the internal source of her fears and discovers the personal strength to do anything.

Becoming Fearless is an inspirational true story that showcases what is possible when you step out of your comfort zone into the wild.

About Brenda Smith:

Brenda lived in North Reading for the first 20 years of her life and graduated from North Reading High School in 1971. After earning a BS in Accounting from Bentley College, she worked for Arthur Anderson in Boston to qualify as a Certified Public Accountant in 1979. Becoming Fearless picks up at this point and tells how she became hooked on whitewater rafting and trained as a guide, subsequently embarking on adventures all over the world.

Brenda grew up living next door to her grandmother, Frances Foster, who served as North Reading's town librarian for 26 years. She earned both an undergraduate and master's degree from Brown University in 1922 and taught math at Wellesley College until she married. After raising her three children, the town approached her and offered her the position of town librarian. Brenda spent many hours in the library after school helping to shelve books and with story hours. She refers to it as her "second home" once her mother also began working there as a librarian. Because both her grandmother and mother had a great love of books, she inherited her own love of books and storytelling. Now retired, she finally has the time and space to dedicate to writing. Brenda recalls her earliest mentor, Nancy Parsons, got her excited about self publishing my stories, though several years passed before she could follow Nancy's advice to "sit down in a chair and put the ideas in her head onto paper (or a word document)." Now Brenda writes every day. She's 90% through the first draft of her second book, a collection of shorter but still hair-raising adventures she's had off the beaten path in exotic parts of the world. 

A graduate of Bentley University, Brenda became a licensed CPA working for corporate, governmental and nonprofit organizations. Spellbound by wanderlust after working as a whitewater river guide for Sobek Expeditions, Brenda has lived, worked, or traveled in over forty countries.

While overseas, Brenda pursued adventures on less-traveled roads through remote villages, collecting a raft of stories about her exploits. While earning her master's degree in philanthropy and media at Suffolk university, she co-produced, co-directed and co-edited an episode for the PBS series The Visionaries shot in Kenya and Tanzania.

Now retired, she lives in Belfast, Maine, documenting cherished memories of her escapades in memoirs, essays and poems, often pounding the keyboard into the wee hours of the morning. She regularly contributes short personal essays to the Portland Press Herald. When the ocean calls, she can be found rowing a dory in Belfast Harbor.