Emerald Lake
A novella by Daniel Nearing

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Emerald Lake follows narrator Aidan Lehrer, an elderly man in Chicago, back to four days in the summer of 1977 - four days he has spent decades circling in his mind without ever fully recounting them for anyone before. At fourteen, Aidan drove into the Canadian Rockies with his older brother, Calvin, drawn mysteriously into a reckoning for their family and for the family they never knew they had.

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Threading through this coming of age narrative is Aidan's candid admission that he can't be trusted to tell it straight. 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 crowd that grief to the edges of the page. We watch an aging man wonder how honestly he can tell a story that was never entirely his to tell. It is the same formal instinct Daniel Nearing built into the balletic protagonist of his 2022 film Sister Carrie, a #MeToo-inflected exploration of  the depiction of women in the history of romantic literature.​

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Emerald Lake originated as a screenplay before 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 writer-director. AGuggenheim 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 at the University of Toronto and holds an MFA from York University.