Moraine 

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In Chicago, an elderly 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 his interpretation of his coming-of-age memories can't fully be trusted, and he knows that the story it isn't entirely his to tell. The brothers’ road crosses the grief of a First Nations family and he sees, even as he writes, how his and Calvin’s losses crowd that grief to the edges of the page. 

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Moraine began as a film script in the 1990s and was shortlisted for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Nearing has reworked it into a novella. An adaptation is planned with 9/23 Films.

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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).