Moraine

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In Chicago, an old man named Nathaniel Walker finally sets down the story he has circled for fifty years: the transformative events of two days in the late spring of 1977, when he was fourteen. His brother Calvin, nineteen, reckless and magnetic and already in trouble with the law, drove them west into the Canadian Rockies to answer a summons from a remote RCMP detachment. Along the way come a hidden hot spring, a bear that isn’t a bear, a jail cell, a sweat lodge, and a reckoning with their dead mother and with a secret Calvin has carried since he was eight years old.

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Nat warns us early and often that he can’t be trusted to tell it straight. The brothers’ road crosses the grief of a First Nations family, and Nat sees, even as he writes, how his and Calvin’s losses crowd that grief to the edges of the page. Moraine is a coming-of-age story told by a man who feels that it isn't entirely his to tell. Nearing uses the same device, a narrator who doubts his own telling, in his 2022 film Sister Carrie, a #MeToo-inflected reckoning with how romantic literature has depicted women.

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Moraine began as a screenplay, which Nearing reworked into a novella in 2026. A film adaptation is planned.

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About the author: Daniel Nearing is a Chicago-based writer-director. A 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 in 2017. He studied under Northrop Frye and Michael Ondaatje, two of his primary influences, at the University of  Toronto.

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Moraine was written and is set on the traditional territories of the Treaty 7 Nations and the Métis Nation (Calgary); the unceded lands of the Ktunaxa and Secwépemc (the Columbia Valley and the B.C. Rockies); Treaty 8 territory (the Athabasca); and the homelands of the Council of Three Fires and many other Nations (Chicago).