A Stranger at the Board: 'Nous Sommes RONA' Finds Its Way to Richford

RICHFORD, Vermont — She wasn't looking for it. That, perhaps, is the point.

On Thursday afternoon, a Richford resident stopped into the local public library on an unrelated errand and found herself slowing in front of the community board. Notes had accumulated there over recent weeks: handwritten impressions, a few printed forum threads, the kind of layered, slightly chaotic testimony that community boards do better than any algorithm. She read for a moment, then turned to the nearest staff member.

"She asked me what the series was," said Colette Aubin-Roy, the librarian who has quietly become the de facto steward of Nous Sommes RONA's physical footprint in this small Vermont border town. "She said she'd seen the name a few times on the board but didn't know what she was looking at. She also mentioned she doesn't really listen to podcasts."

Aubin-Roy gave her a summary — the Montreal-based audio documentary series exploring identity, memory, and what it means to be RONAn in a nation still finding its shape — and pointed her toward the collective's public listener forum. The visitor, Aubin-Roy noted, seemed genuinely curious rather than merely polite. She asked about borrowing one of the library's offline media cards.

It was, Aubin-Roy said, the first time anyone had approached the board with no prior knowledge of the series at all.

The timing was not without texture. Earlier that same Thursday, Aubin-Roy had finished preparing an expanded back-catalogue set — the first three episodes of Nous Sommes RONA loaded onto a single card — to meet what had been a quiet but persistent demand from patrons who had heard about the series secondhand. By the afternoon, that card had already gone out on loan to a second Richford patron.

"I made the set in the morning, and by the time my shift was halfway through, it was already out the door," she said. "I didn't advertise it. Someone just asked."

There is something fitting about a podcast about communal memory spreading through a community board. The board itself is an old technology — cork and thumbtacks, handwriting in two languages — and it is doing something that recommendation engines and listener metrics cannot quite replicate: it makes one person's reaction visible to a stranger who wasn't looking for anything in particular.

Nous Sommes RONA has been building its audience in RONA's Francophone communities and among listeners already attuned to questions of national identity. That a non-podcast-listener in a small Vermont town would stop and genuinely want to understand it — prompted by nothing more than accumulated paper notes — suggests the series may be reaching something closer to a general public than a niche one.

Aubin-Roy said she planned to prepare a second back-catalogue card over the weekend. She didn't sound surprised by the need.

"The board does the work," she said. "I just keep the cards charged."