Finding the Daydreamer

Join Elm Books for Estella Kuchta's stark and  stunning depiction of an escape through the wilds of winter.

When daydream meets intuition, a young ranch wife’s life turns upside down. Fleeing a dangerous husband, she steals away with her young daughter on a wild and unexpected adventure through Depression-era cowboy country in central British Columbia. All the while, she longs to reunite with the cowboy who compels her heart. One escape leads to another as she encounters wild animals, stunning landscapes, suspect businessmen, hunger, abandonment, loneliness, and love. She has nothing to guide her but a strange inner impulse that seems to know the way—if only she can trust it.

"At dawn, the blue spark of Venus pierced the horizon. If I were still at the ranch, I’d be sifting through the stove, hoping to find one red ember so I could start the day’s fire. Instead, I stared up at the dented-tin sky and let myself dream about a cowboy. The one who was the only ember in all the ash I’d made of my life.”

Estella Kuchta is a writer, researcher, and postsecondary instructor in Vancouver, Canada. She has worked as an intern for CBC Radio, an editor for Susila Dharma International, and a research assistant for best-selling author Dr. Gabor Mate. Her creative writing and journalism projects have been published, aired, and broadcast in newspapers and literary magazines, and on radio and TV in Canada and the United States. She earned a BFA in Creative Writing and MA in Literature from the University of British Columbia where she won several awards for writing. For two years, she lived on an isolated mountaintop with no electricity while raising her infant son.