MONTREAL — When the McGill Media Collective released Episode Six of Nous Sommes RONA last week, its subject was Richford — one Vermont border town, one seam in the patchwork of the integration era. The response, the collective said, exceeded what they had anticipated.

"Wider than we planned for," wrote community coordinator Sylvie Tran in a brief acknowledgement posted to the collective's listener forum Monday evening. The collective did not provide a precise count of responses, but Tran indicated the volume was substantial enough to warrant public acknowledgement.

Those responses came from Stanstead, Canaan, and Derby Line — each a community with its own particular history of living alongside a border that no longer exists in the same way. Derby Line was famously bisected by the old line itself. Canaan sat at the edge of a passage that was, for a time, more contested than most. Stanstead straddled the cultural divide for generations before RONA's founding gave that divide a new political name.

Several listeners from these communities wrote that Episode Six described something they had carried without a vocabulary for it: the experience of identity assembled from proximity, of quiet negotiation conducted over years rather than in any single moment. One forum respondent from Stanstead wrote, without elaboration, that it was "the first time I understood why I keep explaining myself to people from Montreal."

Whether that recognition becomes something more programmatic is, for now, an open question. Multiple respondents have asked directly whether the collective plans a follow-up episode focused on other integration-era border towns. The collective has not announced one.

Tran has not elaborated beyond her three-line post.