Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Melody Warnick is an award-winning writer whose essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, O Magazine and Slate. Just to name a few. The scope of her interest is wide. And she’s covered a variety of topics over the years from financial literacy, to sibling relations, to research projects in Appalachia. But a common theme in her writing is a focus on attachment to place. She’s written two books on this topic in fact. 

Her first book, This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are, explores questions of place attachment and how to make the place you live, become the place you want to stay. Her most recent book hot off the presses is, If You Could Live Anywhere: The Surprising Importance of Place in a Work-from-Anywhere World. And it is a response to the rise of remote and freelance work and the newfound freedom and mobility and choices that come with being able to work from anywhere. A chronic mover, Melody managed to fall madly in love with her adopted town of Blacksburg, Virginia, where she continues to reside with her family. And I’m really excited for this conversation about place, Melody. Thank you so much for being on Everywhere radio. 

Melody Warnick: 

Thanks for having me, Whitney. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I’ve been really looking forward to talking with you about the research and the conclusions that you’ve drawn in this newest book especially, If You Could Live Anywhere. It’s a major theme in the life of rural people. I think this connection to place and this longing to align our lives, our values, our economies, with the place that we’re building our lives. So I’ve always described myself as a rural home comer, as a daughter of Athens, Tennessee. And my identity is really bound up in geography and the community that I live in. So again, I’m just excited that you’ve written somewhat about the sense of connection to place. And I wonder how you came to want to chronicle that. 

Melody Warnick: 

Yeah. So I was not someone who really understood my connection to place for a long time. I grew up in Southern California. I tell people I’m from the town just north of Disneyland. And it was a great place to grow up. I stayed in the same community for the first 18 years of my life. Never moved. And then I went to college. And at the end of college, I got married. And all of a sudden my husband and I found ourselves really in this mobile period of our lives. We spent some time in Maryland, in Utah, and Iowa, and Texas. And then we moved to Virginia. And always for reasons, grad school or jobs, or to get a little closer to family, or things like that. 

And I started noticing that a, moving is terribly difficult. It really can impact your life. And there was this other part of moving to me too, where every time I moved, I would assume, “Okay, this new place is going to be it.” This is the place that’s going to change my life forever. I call it the geographic cure. This idea that we can find the right place and it will fix things for us. It will fix us. We will be different, better people in the right place. 

And so I think just those experiences of moving around and then finally landing in Blacksburg, Virginia, a town that I hated at first and had to learn to fall in love with, have really shaped my thinking about place and made me really obsessed with how place affects our lives and who we are honestly. 

Whitney Kimball Coe(04:00): 

I mean, as you were speaking, I was thinking about something my grandfather always used to say was, bloom where you’re planted. So there’s that notion of, wherever you go, put down  some roots, invest in the place and hopefully you bloom there And I wonder if you could describe Blacksburg a little bit and how you were able to start blooming there. 

Melody Warnick:

Yeah. So this is a town of about 45,000 people. We’re never quite sure if that includes the college students, because this is home to Virginia Tech. We have about- 

Whitney Kimball Coe:

That’s right. 

Melody Warnick: …30,000 students here. So it is a smallish town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia that really revolves around the university here. My husband came to become a faculty member here and we had never lived in Virginia. Had never lived in the south at all. And so those first few weeks of living in Blacksburg were just this rude awakening of, “We don’t know anyone here. We don’t know our way around. People have weird accents.” But I need subtitles when I go to the hardware store. And I don’t think it was anything really particularly egregiously bad about Blacksburg, but it just was… It was new. And it was different. And that’s hard. 

So because we had spent this period of time where we were really mobile and moving around. My response to this situation was just like, “Okay, we tried it. It clearly didn’t work. We’ve been here a month and we don’t like it. So let’s just move on. Let’s find a new place. And the new place will be the solution. The new place will fix us.” And I realized that my husband had just started this new job. My kids were in a new school. And moving probably wasn’t realistic. And so I started to think about what has to happen for me to feel like this is home. What is the process here? 

And I’ve been a writer for my whole career and I love to do internet research. And so that’s what I did. I just went down the rabbit hole on anything that’s been written about place and how people relate to it. And that is where I came across the concept of place attachment in the scientific literature, which is the term that researchers and psychologists and sociologists used to describe that feeling of connection that we have with a place. So I call it that, there’s no place like home feeling. The feeling that, this is where I belong. This is my community. These are my people. 

And it has a lot of really positive benefits for us. I think one of the things that’s been interesting as I’ve written and spoken about this is that, particularly for people who live in underdog places, which are often small towns, the Midwest places that people may feel are ignored by the larger community. Understanding place attachment really gives an evidence base to why we care about these places. Why you might stay in a community that maybe doesn’t have all the amenities of a larger place. But why it matters. And it can have lots of positive benefits for your life. Increases in self-esteem and social capital. It’s good for your health. It’s good for your longevity. 

And so the fact of loving where you live and feeling connected and entwined into the life of your town is actually really important in terms of health. In terms of emotion. In terms of wellbeing. So this matters.    

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I mean, I feel that in my bones just living in Athens. But I also feel that it’s a contradiction in a way of wanting to love your community, be part of it, and also do the difficult work of staying in your community and staying in relationship with the people there and understanding that conflict is still going to be part of your experience no matter how much you love your community, or it’s not going to always deliver in the way that you want it to. And I think rural people in particular might be familiar with some of that. So I wonder if your research has… If you could apply that lens in some way to the conflict that… Or maybe it’s an internal and an external conflict of staying in, staying committed to the community. 

Melody Warnick : 

It’s a great question. Because like you said, the idea of blooming where you’re planted, investing and engaging in a place. The research about place attachment shows that certain behaviors can increase place attachment. And none of them are probably anything that you haven’t thought of already. So in my first book, This Is Where You Belong, I did these. In Blacksburg, I went through this process of, I called them, love where you live experiments. 

But they were really just little behavior changes that were designed to make me feel more at home in Blacksburg. So it was things like shopping at the farmer’s market, shopping at locally owned stores, walking more often, volunteering in the community, voting. Things like that that are behavior changes that exhibit your commitment to this community and that have this effect on you of making you feel more connected and hopefully happier in your… 

Melody Warnick : 

… and hopefully happier in your place. And I write a lot and love to tell stories of people who are just champions for their small communities. People who have really dug in and are doing the hard work. But, like you said, there’s this other side of it. I did a book reading in my town and someone asked me, “Is all your advice still the same? These are the things that between when This Is Where You Belong came out in 2016 and now. Has anything changed for how people might develop this relationship with place attachment with their place?” And one of the things I’ve realized is that running for office in a town may not be the thing that makes you love where you live. It might be the thing that makes you really hate the people in your community. Because all of a sudden you’re exposed to their vitriol and you become kind of like this lightning rod for conflict in your town. 

So I think it is a hard balancing act. The more you love your town, the more likely you are to really become invested and want to get involved in helping it become better. But the flip side of that is then you become exposed to all the things that aren’t working in your town, all the people who don’t want change the citizens against virtually everything. And so it i s definitely a challenge. I still encourage people to take that step of finding the place in their community where they can make an impact and getting involved there. But the reality is even when you love your place, it’s not perfect. And we have to learn to accept the imperfections along with the things that we love about it. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I want to talk about, for a moment, this new book and the idea of the Anywhereist worker, the person who has a job that allows them to practically choose anywhere in perhaps the world to make their office and plug in. And at the very beginning of this book, you have a manifesto, the Anywhereist manifesto, which are nine, I guess, principles, about how you can show up in all of these places. So I wonder if you could just talk to me a little bit about the idea of an Anywhereist and how that affects how we find community. 

Melody Warnick : 

So an Anywhereist is a person, we often think of a remote worker as someone who’s just purely location independent. And that category has grown substantially. More than half of Americans can work remotely. About a third of Americans are 100% remote or can be. And so this is a category of people that was already growing before the pandemic, and then the pandemic of course just poured lighter fluid all over this, and the number of people who can work remotely has just exploded. 

It’s not always just remote workers. Anywhereists can also be retirees or entrepreneurs or freelancers. And I also think that even for people who have regular jobs, most of us have Anywhereist moments in our lives, moments where we are at some sort of pivot point in our journey. Maybe we just graduated from college or considering a career change, but a lot of us have those moments of becoming really thoughtful and intentional about where we’re going next. Geographically, where do we want to be? There are careers like teachers and lawyers and doctors and accountants that really can work, they can do their work almost anywhere. 

So I became really interested in when people are in that position of making choices autonomously about where to live. It’s not their company saying you have to live in this city. How do they make those choices and where do people go? And I think I was really particularly interested in what this means for smaller communities. We heard a lot about Zoom towns during the pandemic, this idea that if you’re a remote worker, you really can go anywhere, including these small towns. You just need a good internet connection. And so I think this was a moment of opportunity for a lot of smaller communities and people who live there to say, “Hey, consider us. We’re not a big city, but we may be able to offer you exactly the quality of life that you’re looking for and being in a huge career mecca doesn’t matter for you as much. So think about other things.” And so I was curious about what that looked like and how people can think about place in relationship to their career. 

Whitney Kimball Coe:

And why would people be wanting to go to smaller places maybe or those towns that aren’t necessarily within clusters of innovation and capital exactly? 

Melody Warnick:

Well, I think that there are really two main things that people are looking for when they’re considering a move. First is affordability. And as inflation increases and real estate prices keep going up and up, affordability becomes more and more important for people who are considering a move and that’s something that a lot of small towns excel at. The idea that someone who’s living in San Francisco or New York or a major city can relocate to a smaller community, take their job with them, and it’s like they just got a 300% raise because the cost of living is so much lower. 

The other thing that a lot of people are looking at and that matters for most people is simply quality of life. And quality of life is one of those sort of nebulous terms that can kind of mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. So I like to think of that as do you have access in your daily life to the things that make you happy? And for a lot of people that’s things like access to nature, which small towns are often great at? Or access to a sense of community. Small towns can be really good at that too. So this is kind of a reconsideration of you don’t have to go to New York or to Silicon Valley to launch your business or start your career. You can do those things in a smaller community and have the benefits of a less expensive place and a place that lets you lead a happy life. 

I think the other part of your question, don’t you want to live in a city that offers an economic cluster? I think that people do want to live in places where there are jobs. Research by Ben Winchester, who is the guru of all things rural, shows that people want to live in a radius where if something falls through with their remote work job, they have access to other career paths. But I think also we can think differently about how our communities and especially small towns can support us in our work. I shared a lot of examples of this in my book. For instance, I shared the story of Janee Allen, who was a woman living in Santa Cruz, California, with her husband. And she dreamed of opening a sourdough bakery, this was her hobby making sourdough bread. But California was just so cost prohibitive she just knew that she couldn’t manage that there. And finally they had this aha moment of realizing that their jobs would allow them to work someplace else. 

Janee was a reading specialist at a school and there are school systems all over the country. And so she and her husband went on this big road trip around the country and they ended up settling in Graham, North Carolina, which is a small community, not far from Greensboro. And for the first time in their life, they could afford to buy a house. But also the community was so welcoming and supportive that it helped Janee get her sourdough bakery off the ground. She was invited to bring bread to a meeting of community leaders and people loved it so much that that turned into an invitation to sell at the farmer’s market and that turned into other opportunities. 

So now this is her full-time job, and I really think she credits it to being in this community, a small community that supported her and enabled her to live the dream. And it’s not what probably anyone would think, “I’m going to move to this small town in North Carolina and become a wild success in my business.” But the fact of making that move was really what made it possible for her. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I wonder, in your research, if you come across- 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

… in your research if you come across data that tells us if this opportunity of mobility and choice is for everyone, do our Black and Brown sisters and brothers also have the same opportunity to make these sort of autonomous decisions about landing in some place like Graham or building a life, or is the audience at the moment for this type of freedom, does it speak more to a white group of people? 

Melody Warnick : 

 I think we have data that shows that more white people have the kinds of remote work jobs that give them total autonomy when they’re choosing a location. And I certainly imagine that it’s easier to move as a white person in the country. It’s easier to go to a new, and maybe especially a rural, community and feel welcomed than it is if you’re Brown or Black. I think theoretically the opportunity is there. And that is one of the nice things about being a remote worker is it does give you the freedom, but we also know that about a third of Americans at any given time wish they could move to a new city, but just aren’t. And that can be for a variety of reasons, but we think of financial challenges or the complex relationships that can kind of bind you into a certain place. 

The other thing that I think about is, I think if you have a job and all of a sudden your boss comes to you and says, “We’re going all remote. You don’t need to stay here anymore.” I think for a lot of people that provides this kind of stress and pressure of, “Oh my gosh, I need to take advantage of this freedom. I guess I need to find a new place to live.” And not everyone white or Black or Brown needs to move just because they can. My first book talks all about the benefits of committing to a place and how much good that does for you. The second book talks about being intentional when you are in those moments of choice. And I think both things can balance. 

So when someone is having that anywhere-ist moment of, “Should we move?” That’s really the first question, you know? Do we need to move just because we can? What are we losing if we leave our community? What kinds of social capital and relationships and networks are we leaving behind? Some people will decide to move anyway. The lure of living in a less expensive place, or maybe a slower-paced place or whatever they’re looking for. It’s easier for them to find that elsewhere, but it isn’t a given necessarily. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Mm-hmm. Somebody for my birthday dropped off a handmade cross stitch for me to hang up on my wall that says, “Stay and fight.” And I think they were referencing the politicized moments that we’re in, this season of life where we are almost feeling forced to choose between our neighbors, between zip codes, and make those choices based on our wellbeing and also what sort of impact can we have in our own community. So I look at that often, the stay and fight cross stitch. 

And so I wonder since you wrote the book about commitment to place, and you’ve written a book about this, the anywhere-ist group of folks, you sort of talked about it before, but the polarization that we’re experiencing right now, how are people weighing, making sure that we’re not sorting ourselves to the point where we can’t have a whole nation, a nation that feels whole? 

Melody Warnick : 

I don’t know that people are making sure of that. I think people- 

Whitney Kimball Coe:  

Yeah. 

Melody Warnick : 

One of the things that I talk about in my book is this idea that people are increasingly polarized. People are choosing places based on politics. I’d talked to one woman for my book who lived in the South and was eager to make a move for this reason alone. She felt like she was a liberal in a really conservative community. And when I asked her, “What are you looking for in a place that you would move?” Moving to a more liberal town was literally the only thing, the only thing, that mattered to her. And it’s a sorting thing, but like you said, it’s also a like-minded thing for us to feel at home in communities. We need to feel like we connect with the people around us, that we have something in common. And I think that used to be more like, “Hey, we go to the same church or we’re on the town volleyball team together. Or we’re both volunteering at the movie theater and look at how much we have in common.” And now it seems way more about politics. And I get that, like I feel that I live in a place in the South where, you know, college towns always skew a little liberal. And this is a slightly liberal college town in the midst of a pretty deep red, rural area. And a lot of rural spaces are known for being conservative. And if you are really liberal and you move to a conservative area, it means you’re going to be in conflict with the people who live around you to a certain extent that you might not agree with political decisions. You might find yourself stressed out or frustrated on the regular. So it is a really hard choice. I encourage people … In the book, one of the things I encourage people to do is look for purple places, places that are still a decent mix. And I would never want people to just create their own echo chambers geographically, by moving to a city where you know that you’re in the majority and everyone’s going to agree with you, but it is hard. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Mm-hmm. It is. 

Melody Warnick : 

And I think it’s just going to get harder, honestly. That was a big change from the first book to the second book. I don’t think that people thought this way when they were moving 10 years ago. It certainly never crossed my radar in any previous move that I ever did. But I think it is something that probably most people are at least looking at and thinking about. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah, yeah. Hold on, there’s just one other thing. So you mentioned Ben Winchester, and I know he’s done a bit of work on this. And so have numerous other people talking about the potential for rural revitalization through this kind of Renaissance of remote workers and people being able to live where they want to live. And I’m wondering if, again, if the data is showing us that this is something we can hang our hat on and say, “Yes, this is a-“ 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That this is something we can hang our hat on and say, “Yes, this is something, this is a North Star for rural communities, that this influx of people, anywhereists, or who want to choose to live where they do,” that this is something that we can really hang our hats on. Or is it overblown at this point? Is it an overblown hope? 

Melody Warnick : 

Well, I think what the research is showing is that, when we look at broad swaths of data for the entire country, we are seeing some mobility more to smaller cities. So people are downsizing in terms of the population size of their place. They may not be taking it all the way to a small or a rural community, but what I do think we’re seeing is one-off stories of people who have made this choice, people like Jennie Allen, and in a small community, that’s really what you need, right? It may not be the statistically significant influx of people, but you need a few people who are willing to make that move. 

One thing that I think is really interesting is the growth in programs of offering cash in exchange for remote workers moving to communities,Tulsa Remote really pioneered this in 2018, and lots of smaller communities have started to copy it because it’s a great marketing tool. It’s a gimmick to get people to pay attention. “Hey, remote workers, if you come to our community, we will give you cash money, or we’ll give you free land, or we’ll help you pay off your student loans.” I talked to a couple for the book, If You Could Live Anywhere, who were living in Orlando, Florida. And really, one of their main frustrations was just how big this city was, how much traffic there was, and how expensive real estate was. So they saw an ad for Remote Shoals. The Shoals is an area of Northern Alabama near the Tennessee border, and that was what they were looking for. They wanted a slower pace of life. And so, they relocated with their son and are really happy, and maybe not a super rural community, but definitely a lot smaller than what they were used to. 

So I think this is happening. I certainly anecdotally know of a lot of people who are relocating from cities to smaller towns. You probably know Alissa Hessler of Urban Exodus. And this is kind of the dream for a lot of people who have been living in cities, and they’re really attracted by that idea of a small town. So I don’t know if this is happening on mass yet, or if it will ever happen on mass, but for an individual small town who’s thinking about talent, attraction, and retention, which I think most communities are, I think certainly attracting remote workers and anywhereists is a great strategy. And it is something that can actually happen, and can actually help smaller communities grow. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So you’ve written a book kind of about commitment and being in it for the long haul, you’ve written about this anywhereist moment that we’re in, and I wonder if you’re already working on a third volume. 

Melody Warnick : 

I know, right? 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And I’m not sure what it would be about, but this is part of a continuum of, how are we experiencing place, what is our relationship to it, how does it make for a quality of life, all of those things. 

Melody Warnick : 

Well, it’s funny because when I wrote the first book, I had been a freelance writer for years, and just kind of felt like, “Okay, now I’m a book author, and I’m going to write this book about moving and place, and then I’m going to move on to other topics,” because like you mentioned in your intro, I’ve read about a lot of different things, but I became just completely immersed in this idea of place, and especially doing speaking engagements across the country. And I often am invited to speak in smaller communities, because I think the message of place attachment really resonates for people who live in Marion, Indiana, and Vermillion, South Dakota, as just kind of where you live matters, and you can have an impact on your community. So that, I couldn’t leave it behind, and that led me to write If You Could Live Anywhere. It’s sort of like having a baby where you have to let your brain forget everything that just happened before you’re willing to try it again. And I’m not sure I’m at that point yet, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out, because I love talking about it. I love meeting people from small communities. I said that the super top secret goal of If You Could Live Anywhere was really pointing people to small communities, getting them to consider small towns and rural communities as a place to live. And so, I really leaned into telling stories of how these unexpected and underdog places can really help people save money, become more successful, become happier, find more purpose. I think that, more than anywhere else in the country, it’s really smaller communities that offer the kind of life that really makes people happy in the end, so I was playing that tune.  

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I endorse that message. That’s awesome. So one more question I always ask my guest before we leave is, what are you reading, or watching, or listening to that is inspiring you right now, or challenging you, or blowing your mind? 

Melody Warnick: 

Oh my gosh. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Anything you’d like to share with us? 

Melody Warnick:  

So this is totally unrelated to rural, but I just…  

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah, go for it. 

Melody Warnick : 

I just read the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Subtitle is Why You Can’t Pay Attention. And I think it is… It blew my mind about how we, sort of in the big picture, how we can kind of regain our focus so we can get things done in our communities and make things happen. So I definitely recommend that one for sure. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Stolen Focus. 

Melody Warnick : 

Stolen Focus, yes. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you. That sounds fascinating. 

Melody Warnick : 

Yeah, it was great. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Well, it’s been so great to talk to you, and I encourage everyone to check out your books, especially this newest one, If You Could Live Anywhere. And I really appreciate you saying yes to this conversation. 

Melody Warnick: Thanks so much for having a conversation with me, Whitney. It was a pleasure.