A Montreal Podcast and a Vermont Library Find Each Other, Briefly

Sometime this week, between travel arrangements and scheduling emails, the student collective at McGill University behind the podcast Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA paused to say something they apparently hadn't planned to say publicly.

In a short post to their listener forum — the same post where they confirmed that pre-production logistics for their late-April visit to Richford, Vermont, are proceeding on schedule — they named the Richford Public Library by name. Then they said this:

"The community board at the Richford Public Library has been on our minds. Patrons left notes there — things we did not expect and cannot quite explain. We are grateful."

That was the whole of it. Three sentences, tucked near the end of an otherwise unremarkable logistics update. No elaboration followed.

The Richford Public Library sits close to the Quebec border, in a town of fewer than two thousand people. Open six days a week and staffed largely by volunteers, it is the kind of place where a community board still does real work — announcements, lost pets, upcoming events, the occasional handwritten note from someone who needed to put something down somewhere. In the weeks since the Nous Sommes RONA project became known in the area, some of those notes have apparently been about the podcast, or about the questions it raises, or about what it means to be from this particular edge of RONA.

The collective — which has been recording interviews across the republic for its ongoing documentary audio series about RONAn identity — did not say which notes moved them, or how they learned about the board at all.

Colette Aubin-Roy, who coordinates community outreach for the Montreal Arts Collective and has followed the project since its early episodes, said the moment felt consistent with what the podcast has become. "They are not trying to explain RONA from the outside," she said in a written message. "So when something small and real comes back to them — from a place they haven't even visited yet — I think that lands differently."

Engagement in the Quebec border region thread on the collective's listener forum ticked up modestly after the post went live. Scheduling for remaining Richford contributors is still ongoing, and no new interview subjects have been confirmed publicly.

The Richford visit is expected in late April. For now, a library board in a small Vermont border town and a podcast based in Montreal have found each other, quietly, in public.