Emerald Lake
A novella by Daniel Nearing

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In the spring of 1977, a DUI charge reopens an old, sealed juvenile record, and nineteen-year-old Calvin Lehrer is ordered to appear at a remote RCMP outpost at Emerald Lake, deep in the Canadian Rockies, to have his pardon restored. He brings his younger brother, fourteen-year-old Aidan, along for the drive west from Calgary — meaning to make a good story out of a bad situation, the way he always has. What's waiting for them at the lake is not the paperwork Calvin expects, but a family history both brothers have spent their whole lives not asking about.

Fifty years later, an elderly Aidan sits in Chicago, still working out how to tell it — piecing together what he witnessed, what his brother told him afterward, usually drunk, usually proud, and what he can only imagine. Written in a spare, Hemingway- and Fitzgerald-inflected style, Emerald Lake moves between one unforgettable stretch of road and the decades of memory that follow it: mothers lost to addiction and grief, brothers bound by loyalty and rage, first love, and a mountain lake that holds the story's quiet, devastating center.

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

About the author: Daniel Nearing is a Chicago-based filmmaker, educator, and Guggenheim and MacDowell Fellow. He was 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.