A writer can speak about a river. A writer can write with a river. A writer can be written by a river.
The three prepositions look like minor stylistic alternatives. Macfarlane treats them as marking three distinct metaphysical postures, each with different implications for what the writing is, what the writer is for, and how the work is done.1
About — the river is object, the writer is subject. Standard scientific or descriptive prose. The river is what you write about; you remain separate, observing, framing, reporting.
With — the river is co-author, the writer is collaborator. The river's rhythms, presences, and tones contribute to how the sentence is shaped. You no longer write about the river; you write with the river the way you'd write with a colleague.
By — the river is author, the writer is conduit. The river is doing the writing through the human body that hosts the language. At the end of his four-year Is a River Alive? journey, Macfarlane describes ten or twelve days of being battered by a wild river, and at the end I came to know briefly and very consequentially what it meant to be written by rivers.1
The prepositions chart a path from object-relation to co-author-relation to conduit-relation. The shift is metaphysical because each preposition presupposes a different ontology of who is acting and who is acted upon.
The shift from about to with requires:
The shift from with to by requires:
Most writers — even most nature writers — stop at about. Some reach with. Very few sustain by through a book-length work, because the conditions for by require months of immersive presence with a subject most writers do not have access to.
When Macfarlane describes the by state, Perell offers the word conduit. Macfarlane: Yes. You become a channel. Exactly. A conduit is a lovely word for it because it is a river word. Water seeks a body. We're water bodies. Sometimes that's the banks of the river. Sometimes it's a wetland. Sometimes it's a human body. In this case, I felt very strongly that the river was almost creating language through me as a conduit.1
The metaphor is precise. A conduit is something water moves through without altering the water. The river-being moved through Macfarlane's body and emerged as language. The language is the river's, in a real sense; Macfarlane is the channel.
This is the closest secular literary analog to what mystical traditions describe as inspiration — the artist as instrument of something larger. Macfarlane is careful not to make spiritual claims; he describes the experience phenomenologically. But the structural identity to inspiration-as-being-played is unmistakable.
A writer who stays at about produces prose that informs the reader. The reader learns about the river but does not feel the river. The information layer transfers; the relational layer does not. For most journalism this is fine — the journalism is for the information.
A writer who reaches with produces prose that brings the reader into relation with the river. The sentences move at the river's pace; the imagery emerges from the river's presence; the reader's body responds to the prose the way it would respond to the river. The information layer still transfers; the relational layer now also transfers.
A writer who reaches by produces prose that does not depend on the writer's organizing capacity. The river's voice carries through. The reader meets the river directly through the conduit; the writer's individual style recedes. This is what Macfarlane means when he says he was written by the river — the language is not what he would have written from his desk; it is what the river produced through him.
Macfarlane and Karlsson's writing-as-summoning-culture converge on the principle that writing has metaphysical dimensions the standard craft discourse doesn't acknowledge. Karlsson summons a culture that can hold him; Macfarlane is written by rivers. Both describe writing as relation-with-non-self rather than self-expression. The split: Karlsson's non-self is future readers; Macfarlane's non-self is non-human nature. They share an ontology of writing-as-relation; they differ on what the writer is in relation with.
Macfarlane diverges from Bilton's narrative-nonfiction methodology on the question of authorship. Bilton's writer is unambiguously the author — the database is assembled, the chapters are composed, the prose is engineered, the credit and accountability are clear. Macfarlane's by-river writer is partially de-authored — the river contributed; the writer was conduit. The split reveals two genuinely different theories of what authorship is for: Bilton's writer is craftsman-author; Macfarlane's writer is relational-conduit.
The preposition-shift maps onto two adjacent domains where the same ontological-shift mechanism appears under different vocabulary: Eastern-spirituality (the meditative tradition's progression from observer to non-dual participant) and African-spirituality (the divination-and-channeling traditions where the practitioner becomes conduit for ancestral or divine voice).
Eastern-Spirituality: Pratyabhijñā — Recognition Doctrine (Kashmir Shaivism) — the recognition doctrine in Kashmir Shaiva tradition charts a path from the practitioner's experience of separate-self-observing-world to the recognition that the observed and the observer are the same single consciousness. The progression is structurally identical to Macfarlane's about → with → by: observer-of-river, collaborator-with-river, channel-for-river-which-is-also-self. The structural identity: both traditions describe an ontological progression in which the boundary between self and subject thins and eventually dissolves. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's secular literary methodology is operating in the same territory that Kashmir Shaivism systematized 1,200 years ago — and the writer who has read Abhinavagupta on recognition has a vocabulary for the experience Macfarlane reports that the secular literary tradition lacks. The relational-writing methodology and the recognition doctrine are converging on the same finding from different epistemic traditions.
African-Spirituality: Ifa Divination as Channeled Voice — the Ifa divination tradition (Yoruba; West African) involves a babalawo who, properly prepared, becomes conduit for the wisdom of Orunmila. The practitioner is not author of the divination's content; the practitioner is the channel. The training requires years of preparation; the actual divination requires the practitioner to recede into conduit-state. Macfarlane's by-river state is structurally identical: years of preparation (twenty-two years of writing about nature, four years on this specific river) followed by a state in which the writer recedes and the river's voice carries through. The structural identity: both traditions describe extended preparation that culminates in self-erasure such that another voice can speak through the human instrument. The insight neither domain generates alone: the channeling traditions of West Africa and the relational-writing methodology of Cambridge-trained Macfarlane are operating in the same conceptual territory — and the methodological discipline (extended preparation, ritualized relation, self-erasure at the moment of voicing) is the same in both. The literary tradition has rediscovered, in secular form, what traditional spiritual lineages have practiced for millennia.
A third connection worth marking: the preposition-shift has structural similarity to Karlsson's animating-question (discussed in Author T&C) — both treat writing as relation-with-non-self that organizes everything else.
The Sharpest Implication
If preposition-shift marks real metaphysical distance and the writers who stop at about are producing prose that informs without transforming, then the standard nonfiction craft discourse — which treats prepositions as stylistic choices rather than ontological commitments — is silently endorsing the lowest-relation form as the default. The uncomfortable implication: most nonfiction prose is structurally limited by an unstated ontological assumption (the subject is object; the writer is observer) that the writer never examines. Macfarlane's discipline isn't a stylistic tic. It's an invitation to examine the ontology underneath your prepositions and notice that you've been writing about everything for your whole career because you never noticed there were other options.
Generative Questions