I’m excited to share with you all the second episode of “Good Night, New York, I Love You: The Podcast.” Today's guest is Dr. Analeigh E. Horton, a writer, teacher, and traveler who studies how people use language and technology to connect with the world around them. She's an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She's also a Fulbright alum, and she's taught in China, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and across the U.S. Analeigh's work looks at how identity and culture shape the way we read, write, and communicate. In this episode, Analeigh and I explore the transformative power of travel. She talks about culture shock and the value of being open to new experiences. She shares stories from her own travels and emphasizes the significance of curiosity, resilience, and gratitude in nurturing our relationships with the places we visit. As always, you can watch the video here on substack, or you can watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also find the transcript below. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with others, and let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks for listening! Thanks for reading Good Night, New York, I Love You! Subscribe for free to receive new posts + podcasts episodes and to support my work. Jane Marie: Analeigh, welcome to "Goodnight, New York, I love you." I'm so happy to have you as a guest. Analeigh: Thanks for having me. Jane Marie: Tell everyone how we are connected. Analeigh: Well, we wound up having the same favorite professor in college. And we did student government together. Years later, I wound up moving to the city and reached out to you as someone that I was like, "Hey, I haven't talked to you in forever, but I need a friend. Will you be mine?" We've been reconnected for the past two years. I just celebrated my full two year anniversary, starting year three here. Jane Marie: What's funny about you telling the story of us reconnecting: You reached out to me and you said, "I just moved to the New York area, and I'm looking for friends. Let's reconnect." And I think the first time we reconnected was at my Friendsgiving. Analeigh: It was, yeah. Jane Marie: To me, part of living in New York as someone who is not from here is being open to new people coming into your friend group at all times. Because people come and go from the city all the time. And I'm glad that you came in to my circle of friends. Analeigh: And what a quintessential moment to do that. I mean, if you've seen "Friends" the show, you know how important Thanksgiving is! So to have my first Thanksgiving in a New York apartment, yours was the first apartment I had been in, and to celebrate Thanksgiving, it was definitely something to check off the bucket list. Jane Marie: Let's dive right in. Tell me about a place that you love. Analeigh: Okay, so I was thinking really hard about this but can I say loving everywhere? Jane Marie: I love that. Analeigh: Because for me, there have been places that I've been to that I did absolutely instantly feel that, "Oh my gosh, I could move here," or, "holy cow, this nature is incredible!" Some places I have grown to love, and there have been some places that I really haven't enjoyed but have still appreciated the lessons that I've learned from being in those places. I certainly can't say I have enjoyed seeing concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe. I can't say I enjoyed being on the DMZ stepping into the North Korean side of the United Nations hut, right? But it was an important moment. All of those were important moments for me to bear witness to, "These things are happening," and "What's my responsibility as a global citizen moving forward?" I really do love everywhere, even if it seems like places maybe don't deserve some love. Because even to go back to those two really drastic examples, North Koreans are still people who deserve love, and the people who perished in concentration camps are still worthy of being loved and honored and respected. I really do love everywhere. I've traveled to 35 countries, which for some, like me, is like, "Holy cow." Never thought that I would be there. Growing up, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was exotic for our family. And to other people, 35 is barely a dent in the 196 countries that the UN recognizes. I really do love all of the places. And of course I have some favorites, so if you really need a specific place to fill in the blank, I really loved my experiences teaching in China. That was just a completely whole new world for me. I loved living in London for a semester, which we both did in college. Again, that was just opening a whole new world for me. The same with living in Spain. As far as the U.S. goes, I've lived in five different states at this point. I feel like I have four different hometowns. I claim Atlanta and Nashville as the places where I grew up. I was born in Atlanta, but I did most of high school in Nashville. I feel home in terms of I was a kid in Atlanta. Nashville was, I mean, high school was a quintessential experience for lots of people, whether it was positive or negative. So I did a lot of growing up there. And then ultimately through school, I wound up spending six years in Alabama, and I claim Birmingham as well. But then I lived in Tucson for four years working on my doctorate. The one place that I do not call home is North Jersey, but I am currently living here. Jane Marie: You bring up a really important point when you talk about every place having value. When you said, "I've been to places that are not necessarily comfortable.” I want to dive deeper into that idea of what you mean and what can we learn from this idea that every place has value. How did you come to approach the world in this way and your travels in this way? What helped you have that perspective? Analeigh: The first place that comes immediately to mind is Aguascalientes, Mexico. A lot of people may have never heard of it, although it is a very large city in Mexico. It actually, within the city, has the geographic center of the Americas, north, south, east, and west, so it actually is an important city. The reason that I went there though was because my maternal uncle married a girl from Aguascalientes. She was working in a restaurant outside of Atlanta, and he became a regular. She was the server, and so they fell in love at this hole in the wall barbecue restaurant attached to a gas station. But she invited me two weeks after I had graduated high school to go to Aguascalientes, and I was all for it. Like I said, Myrtle Beach was exotic for my family, and so this was just this amazing experience. I flew through Nashville to Houston, and I was 17 years old at the time. I remember in Houston, they wouldn't let me on the plane. They were convinced that either I was being trafficked or I was trafficking someone or something because I was by myself, I was super young, my passport had a stamp to Canada from a mission trip in it, but that was it. I was able to explain to them, and they believed me, but they were like, "If this is really what you want to do, okay!" And let me on the plane. And when you walk out of an airport, there's always that bar and the people waiting behind it. And I walked out, and I see a sea of faces that I do not know, and my stomach dropped. Everyone was telling me I wasn't supposed to go here, and they were right! I have never been so happy to see my cousin burst through the legs-- he was like three years old at the time-- of these people. I actually went and taught English with my aunt's sister-in-law at the local middle and high school there. But everyone else spoke Spanish, and I realized then that I would never be able to connect with these people in this way if I couldn't speak the language. That's really what interested me in studying language and continuing through this field, professionally, of linguistics and intercultural communication and all of this stuff. That trip was really my first real dose of culture shock and learning that there's a lot of world outside of the Deep South and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. You can choose to stay in that place if you want. There's some really great things about that area. Fried chicken is one. But if you want to go see other things, meet other people, try new foods, it's a really big world out there. Jane Marie: It's a big world. I think that's a really powerful lesson to learn so young, that there is much more to life and more ways of being outside of what we've experienced in our own hometowns. Tell us more about your experience in China, because you mentioned that as a place that you love, and all of the things that you learned while you were there. Analeigh: I think that would be another, maybe the second example, of a really huge culture shock that I've gone through in my life. By the time I went to teach in China, I was 25. I went for two summers. I was in a master's program in Applied Linguistics and Teaching English to speakers of other languages at the University of Alabama. And so I went to Wuhan, in between my first and second year, and then I graduated and went to Suzhou the summer after. Now, because of the pandemic, everyone knows Wuhan and has a very specific feeling about it. When I went, no one had ever heard of Wuhan. I remember my grandpapa, he had a magnifying glass and was looking at a globe trying to figure out where this place was, and everyone was super confused as to why it was going. I was completely exhausted the entire time, which seems like an odd takeaway to immediately have, perhaps. But every single thing was a cultural shock to me. You shock yourself over and over and over again. Right? I was completely exhausted from all of this learning and observing and experimenting with the culture: What had I been taught about this place, versus what was I actually experiencing? What were Chinese people teaching me as I was there? It can be really hard, but that
