Emerald Lake
A novella by Daniel Nearing

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Emerald Lake follows Aidan Lehrer, an elderly man in Chicago, back to four days in the summer of 1977 - four days he has spent decades circling without ever fully recounting. At fourteen, Aidan drove into the Canadian Rockies with his older brother, Calvin, toward a reckoning that ultimately belonged to more than just their own family.

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Threading through the narrative as powerfully as the events themselves is Aidan's candid admission that he cannot be trusted to tell it straight. He knows the story cuts through the grief of a First Nations community along the way, and he recognizes, even in the act of telling, that his and his brother's own losses keep crowding that grief to the edges of the page. It is the same formal instinct Daniel Nearing built into the balletic protagonist of his 2022 film Sister Carrie, a subtle literary reckoning with the #MeToo movement: in that case, "never trust the point of view of a man," and in this case not even, or especially, the one telling you the story.

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Emerald Lake is less interested in solving its central mystery than in watching an aging man decide, in real time, how honestly he can tell a story that was never entirely his to tell, and in examining what happens when two brothers' devotion to each other collides with a cross-cultural tragedy.

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Emerald Lake originated as a screenplay before Daniel Nearing reworked it into this 2026 novella. A companion film adaptation is anticipated in 2027.

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About the author: Daniel Nearing is a Chicago-based filmmaker, educator, and Guggenheim and MacDowell Fellow. He served as the inaugural Filmmaker in Residence for the City of Chicago and was named the Chicago Tribune’s Chicagoan of the Year for Film. He studied under Northrop Frye and Michael Ondaatje at the University of Toronto and holds an MFA from York University.