“Our interests aren’t siloed but our information is.”

                                          – Adriana Baer, I’m Into This Place podcast

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Adriana Baer is on a mission.

In and of itself, that is not so unusual. Baer is an artist, a leader, a restless spirit. If she doesn’t have a mission, she’s going to find one. Baer is always moving, shaking, changing and making something. And right now, she is focused on discovering and uplifting other movers, shakers and artmakers of the place she now calls home, Clark County in a southwest corner of Washington State.

How is she doing this? Via a brand new podcast she’s created, hosts, and maintains, I’m Into This Place. You want to jump right in and start listening? Go right here: imintothisplace.buzzsprout.com/follow

I’m Into This Place’s stated mission is to celebrate “the vibrant arts, culture and heritage of Clark County, Washington by amplifying voices and sharing engaging stories. We spark curiosity, encourage exploration, connect the community, and highlight the creativity that strengthens economy and cultural identity.”

If that sounds like a lot, it is. But in the first month of its existence, I’m Into This Place is already making good on its promise. In that time, Baer has presented:

• Clark County Historical Museum, which among other things lets you trace local history up to the present through the stories of local breweries, past, present and functioning to this day, while you are drinking beer at the exhibit’s bar; 
• Vancouver Ballet Folklórico, a mother-daughter team that runs a traditional Mexican dance company that is one of the treasures of the region; 
• Richland Hub Coffee, a coffee-maker from Tanzania who through the company’s Project Sharity program sends profits back home to Africa to fund the building of a medical center in Tanzania’s rural Mbeya region. 

There is more — a lot more — and a lot more coming up on Baer’s podcast. Clark County, it seems, doesn’t just have arts and culture, it’s teeming with it. 

What it was missing was a means, a way, a platform that would showcase, highlight and draw a thread through the myriad disciplines, companies and humans that Baer was finding. Because there is one, she is sure, and it’s deeper and more encompassing than is often thought. 

“When people think about ‘my home culture’ it’s not just about ‘What do I like to dance to,’ It’s also about ‘what do I like to eat?’ ‘What am I talking about when I’m sitting around a table?’” says Baer.

So, a simple list of what was happening this weekend wasn’t going to cut it. Baer was thinking about arts, yes, and culture, absolutely, but also heritage and all the complexities and history that word implies, and how all these different aspects reshape themselves into something new and different in the 21^st century. “I was looking for that substantive connection,” she says. And so, she set about making it. 

Baer, a native Californian, received her BFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her Master of Fine Arts in Directing from Columbia University. She was an associate artistic director of Cutting Ball Theatre and became artistic director of Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon, by the age of thirty. She has worked at theaters across the country, from The Public in New York to the Alley in Houston to Portland Center Stage. She’s taught at Portland State University, Columbia University School of the Arts, the Acting Company and Berkeley School of the Arts. After she left Profile, besides freelance directing, Baer also coached public speaking and gave lectures at universities across the nation. She worked for a CBD company. She even hosted a podcast. 

When Baer and her family (husband Ryan Durham and daughter Fiona) moved from Portland to the Clark County town of Ridgefield, Washington in the summer of 2021, one of the first events they attended was Four Days of Aloha.

“Four Days of Aloha,” says Baer, “is a Hawaiian cultural festival that brings people in from all over the world, and then they also do a day of multicultural events at the end so there’s like, I don’t even know how many, but many many many  groups from here, that perform in the main park of Vancouver, the last day of that festival. That was the first thing I went to when we moved up. So, immediately I was like, ‘There’s a lot going on here.’ I don’t think it presents to your face as obviously as it does in a more condensed area like Portland, where it’s on every corner.”

Yet the more she looked, the more Baer was inspired by the brilliant artists, original thinkers, history keepers and storytellers that she found.

“I was looking for the arts community,” she says. “What I found was a lot of independent, interesting creative human beings that for various reasons, live in Clark County. Maybe they came here just because they like it, or they needed more space, or it was cheaper than Portland; whatever their original reasons are. You can stay in your bubble anywhere. What’s really compelling to me is seeing how many artists and creative people have chosen to live here because they want a balanced life.”

Experiencing these creatives doing their thing gave Baer an idea. “I was like, ‘I think I should start an arts and culture podcast,’ and then it grew. My hope is that this becomes a substantive place where people come no matter whether they’re podcast listeners or not, where they come to find out about what’s happening in this community.”

True to her trademark attention to detail, Baer was intentional and thoughtful about her new enterprise. “I did a lot of digging to make sure that I wasn’t covering material that wasn’t already being covered some other way,” she says. “Because I love podcasting as a medium, that was an easy way in for me. It’s fun, I love it, it’s how I consume content. And I didn’t find any arts and culture-specific podcast anywhere in southwest Washington.

“My target audience is not the culture-makers themselves. It’s the audience that can come and give them their money and time and energy. That’s one of the reasons the episodes are the length that they are. I researched the average amount of time somebody spends in their car in Clark County was about 20 minutes a day, and I was like, ‘Great, my episodes are going to be about 20 minutes.’”

Though her primary goals are to support and uplift the arts and culture community, Baer manages to find ways to elegantly bring up more difficult subjects as well, such as the ever-present (and growing) problem of funding.

In a telling moment during the Ballet Folklórico segment, founder Anna Cruz talked about how funders want to support the “fun” stuff, the costumes and the headpieces, but it’s harder to find money for the nuts-and-bolts stuff that’s just as important. “It’s like, ‘ooh, I want to support the dance costumes’ or ‘I want to support buying the shoes or the headpieces,’” says Cruz in the episode. “And operational sometimes is a lot of money, like insurance, like the webpage, like storage.”

This is an integral facet of I Am Into This Place’s intention. “One of the things that is important about this work,” says Baer, “is that there is an advocacy element that I’m trying to provide for the community about, ‘Let’s make sure that these foundations, that these philanthropists, that these congresspeople know that the arts is alive and thriving in southwest Washington,’ so that they’re voting and paying for these things.”

And she’s not afraid to take a clear stance on potentially volatile subject matter that’s going to directly affect the community she’s highlighting: “I include action alerts. For example, the public media funding stuff that’s come up this past week. I had an action alert that said, ‘Here’s the statement. Let’s call our senators and …’ I’m not a journalist. I’m an independent features creator.  I can say what I want. I can say ‘Let’s please not kill the NEA.’”

The question of funding is, of course, dear to the heart of Baer, the lifelong artist, and a subject she speaks on with both eloquence and passion.

“The per-capita arts funding across the country and in Washington State is extremely low,” she says. “Washington State is number one in the country for the impact of arts and culture on the state economy, but we’re 37^th in the country for how much the state is putting back into arts and culture. That is really off-kilter. Those are the kind of arguments that I’m trying to start building throughout this body of work that I’m making that can then go, ‘Hey look, this is the economic impact of the Vancouver Arts and Music Festival on downtown Vancouver.’”

But the engine of the podcast is the richness and depth of Baer’s encounters with the artists, creators, and dreamers she covers. These are real conversations with everyday people working to create the world they want to live in, in a crazy variety of surprising and inspiring ways: 

• The conservationist who is converting lowland pastures back into wetlands and a salmon habitat and invites artists to take part. (The Plas Newydd Farm). 
• The conductor who leads a band that preserves 100-year-old jazz music by playing 100-year-old jazz instruments. (The Historic Music Preservation Project). 
• The former theater costume designer who is converting an old library building into an arts hub. (The Vancouver Arts Hub). 
• The husband-and-wife farmers who run an eco-friendly alpaca farm that makes eco-friendly socks and sweaters. 
• A Chinook storyteller who talks about his heritage and stories of the region that Baer’s audience might not have heard (upcoming).

Typically, Baer goes out to where the subject of each episode is. “If I can,” she says, “I’m with the people in their space. Most of the recording happens on-site. People are way more comfortable when they’re in their element. I record there and then we edit. My editor is really good, and I have really good mics.”

Meeting people is essential also because place is a force that drives these creators as much as anything else. “People are very connected to the environment in a way that I don’t think people are able to be in big cities,” says Baer, “just because nature isn’t as present. When people choose to live in the Pacific Northwest there is that vibe of, ‘I want to be an hour from the beach. I want to be an hour from the mountain. I want to be able to see the green things, and that gets into people’s work.”

Though I’m Into This Place just launched at the end of May this year, Baer has been working on it since November of last year. A month and some change into it, the biggest challenge has just been getting the word out that the podcast exists. 

“I mean, man,” she says, “it is one-by-one growth. It’s like, I need this person to tell this person to tell this person. I, on my own, as an individual podcast creator, cannot turn a non-podcast listener into a podcast listener. If you’ve never listened to a podcast or you’re not interested in podcasts, it’s really that barrier feels extremely thick, right? There’s no magic billion-dollar budget that makes everyone in Clark County know about this right away. It’s all building the listenership through community connections.”

To that end, Baer is working to make I’m Into This Place meet her audience whever they’re at. The website is multifaceted. You can, of course, listen to the episode (there are episode pages where you can read about the subject, or watch short videos that highlight certain aspects). And there is even a weekly newsletter that lets you know what’s going on and what’s coming up both on the podcast and in Clark County.

She’s also finding ways to get the community itself to talk about the artists, artisans, and local businesses that they support or are inspired by. At the end of each episode, Baer asks her interviewee who is someone in Clark County that inspires them? It’s a simple, beautiful, almost profound way to close out each episode and connect people. 

“I can only feature one episode a week, is what I have the capacity to do on my own,” says Baer. “If I’m crazy and I do fifty episodes a year, which I probably also can’t do, I want to be able to pay it forward and expand and be able to call out multiple organizations.”

In the future, the plan is to have folks call in and shout out their favorites. She’ll record them and put their voices at the end of the podcast. Or, she’ll set up booths at farmers markets or fairs, where people can just walk up and do the same.

This intentionality is one of the truly distinguishing and most appealing features of I’m Into This Place, and permeates throughout the podcast, the website, and the interviews. It’s often easy for “community” to fade into the white noise of all the other buzzwords losing their meaning in these deeply troubled times. But the authenticity of Baer’s invitation always comes through.

“One thing that’s been really nice is how happy everybody is that I’m doing this,” she says. “There’s not a lot of cynicism in the community, which feels really nice. People are having hard conversations, like, I wish things were different or that were different, or I wish this funding was happening in a different way, but there’s not a lot of cynicism or bitterness. It feels like there’s a lot more community focus.”

“Community focus.” In these troubled times the word “community” gets tossed around and twisted and distorted so much it’s hard to even recognize the word. In I’m Into This Place, Adriana Baer doesn’t try to define community for the listener. She lets the community speak for itself.