RICHFORD, Vermont — For a town that spent years watching history happen at its doorstep, the notice tacked to the Richford Public Library's community board this week was a small thing — a shared forum post, a few lines of text — but people stopped to read it.

The McGill student collective behind the oral history podcast Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA confirmed in a listener forum update that at least one interview subject from Richford has been scheduled for the final week of April. The post named neither the subject nor the format, but library staff member Colette Aubin-Roy shared it to the library's community board within hours of it going live online.

"I wanted people to see it right away," said Aubin-Roy, who has served as an informal point of contact between Richford residents and the collective since the project was first announced. "There are folks here who submitted their stories months ago and haven't heard anything. This tells them it's real. It's happening."

Richford sits in the far north of the Vermont principality, pressed against what was once an international border with Quebec. For many of its residents, the integration period that followed Canada's federal collapse in 2036 was not a distant news event but a lived disruption — neighbors crossing in both directions, family arrangements complicated overnight, a community caught between two newly forming realities before those realities gradually merged. It is exactly the kind of local, granular experience the McGill collective says it is trying to document.

The Richford Public Library extended its help hours earlier this winter to assist community members who wanted to submit to the project but needed support navigating the online portal or drafting their responses in either English or French. At least eleven submissions have come in from the Richford area, according to Aubin-Roy — a figure she describes as higher than anyone anticipated for a town of Richford's size.

"People have things they want to say," she said. "They just needed a door to walk through."

Engagement on the collective's Quebec border community thread rose noticeably after the scheduling announcement was posted, with forum members expressing relief that the project's timeline appears to be holding. The collective encouraged Richford submitters who have not yet been contacted to remain patient, noting that scheduling is still ongoing.

Aubin-Roy said the library plans to keep its extended help hours in place through April for anyone with questions about the process. "We're not done yet," she said. "And honestly, I hope we aren't."