Richford Library Reaches Across the Old Border for a June Listening Event
A short email from library staffer Colette Aubin-Roy to a Montreal arts collective signals that a small, cross-border gathering is quietly taking shape in the Richford reading room. No date is fixed yet, but the window is late June.
RICHFORD, Vermont — The message was, by its author's own description, deliberately short.
On Tuesday evening, Colette Aubin-Roy, a staff member at the Richford Public Library, sent a brief note to the contact address of a Montreal-based arts collective, letting them know that a late-June Saturday is under discussion for a community listening event — and that the library's reading room has been confirmed as available for it.
"Short on purpose," Aubin-Roy told volunteer Marielle Trottier-Blais afterward. "The date isn't fixed yet, and I didn't want to get ahead of the people who asked for this."
The people who asked for it were two attendees from the Stanstead–Richford area who had approached the library with a request rooted in a specific and modest ambition: to gather in the reading room and listen, together, to the seventh episode of a project produced by the collective — a group with roots in what is now the RONAn principality of Quebec. They submitted their request after the collective had already sent the library an unsolicited thank-you note, a detail that appears to have warmed the library's willingness to make space.
Tuesday's email marked the first direct exchange between Aubin-Roy and the collective since that thank-you note arrived. It is also, in practical terms, the first time the listening event moved from a library-internal question — can we do this, where would we put people — into something resembling coordination between two parties on either side of the old international line.
That line no longer marks a national boundary. Quebec's integration into RONA has been official since 2036. But the border between Vermont and Quebec retains a cultural weight, a residue of decades when crossing it meant something different, and when the institutions on either side had no particular reason to talk to each other. A Richford library and a Montreal arts collective planning a shared Saturday in late June is, in that context, a meaningful small thing.
No response from the collective had been received by the time the library closed Tuesday. Aubin-Roy said she expected to hear back within the week, and that once a firm date is settled, a public announcement would follow through the library's usual channels.
The reading room holds about thirty people, if you don't mind the chairs being close together.