Emerald Lake
A novella by Daniel Nearing

​​

​

Emerald Lake follows Aidan Lehrer, an elderly man in Chicago, back into four days in the summer of 1977 that he has spent decades circling without ever fully telling - four days he spent, at fourteen, driving into the Canadian Rockies with his older brother Calvin toward a reckoning that turns out to belong to more than their own family.

​

What threads through the telling as much as the events themselves is Aidan's open admission that he cannot be trusted to tell it straight. He knows the story runs through the grief of a First Nations community along the way, and he knows, even as he tells it, that his own and his brother's loss keeps crowding that grief to the edges of the page. The book lets him say so. It's the same instinct Nearing built into the balletic protagonist in his 2022 film Sister Carrie, an adaptive literary reckoning with #metoo. "Never trust the point of view of a man," not even, or especially, the one telling you the story.

​

Emerald Lake is less interested in solving its central mystery than in watching an elderly man decide, in real time, how honestly he can tell a story that was never entirely his to tell, and in what happens when two brothers' devotion to each other collides with a cost that landed, first, on someone else.

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.