FXBG Advance Sunday, June 21, 2026
Road Kill: Death of a KKKer Street Name. Pro-Tips on Writing College Recs. Scary and Not-So-Scary Books. A Budget Deal in Virginia? Really?
Roadkill: The Long, Slow, Torturous Death of a Fredericksburg Street Name
By Steve Watkins, Advance Editor
It took five years of meetings, studies, research, polling, foot-dragging, and hand-wringing, but Fredericksburg City Council finally got rid of an “r.”
You might have missed it. I know I did. The deed was finally done a year ago, quietly, in the dead of night. Well, quietly, anyway: an unceremonious change of intersection signs and home addresses on a short L-shaped street with 23 properties, 12 of them “renter-occupied,” just off Lafayette Boulevard.
And just like that, “Forrest Avenue”—named in honor of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—became “Forest Avenue,” named in honor of any large area covered chiefly with trees and undergrowth.
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Semi-Pro-Tips on Writing College Recommendations
By Drew Gallagher, Advance Columnist
Not long ago, a kid from our neighborhood asked me to write him a letter of recommendation. He was hoping to land a football scholarship at an obscure Division I college out west that competes in something called the Big Sky Conference—which I’m pretty sure they would prefer I not refer to by their first two initials, even then no one has every heard of them.
Based on the sway that athletics holds over institutes of higher education, my character reference could have been written in crayon, just so long as long as I didn’t bring up pending murder charges, or the time I found the young man sleeping under our front hedgerow with a half-empty case of Busch Light Apple.
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A Little Light Reading (and Plenty of Heavy if That’s Your Thing)
WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW of BOOKS
From Marcie Geffner’s WIRB review of All Us Saints:
Katherine Packert Burke’s contemporary gothic novel, All Us Saints, portrays the tormented lives of four adult siblings almost two decades after three teenaged girls were killed inside their home. With a large cast of dramatis personae and a minimalistic plot, the author relies on a theatrical, locked-room structure, creepy images, and themes related to gender, sexuality, and violence to hold the story together.
On the evening of May 31, 2011, Calla St. Cloud, a creatively blocked New York playwright, her younger brother, James, a video-store clerk, and James’ girlfriend, Heather, arrive at the St. Cloud home in a small town in Virginia. The place is owned by Calla and James’ elder sister, Edna, a local photographer whose career has stalled. The other occupants are Edna’s husband, Roger, author of Doll Parts: Isolation, Transvestism, and the St. Cloud Family Murders, a true-crime book about the tragedy, and their daughter, Wren.
Shut inside the house, the family extinguishes lit candles one by one while Roger reads a script that reenacts the horrific events that occurred on the same night 19 years earlier.
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Virginia Budget Leaders Reach ‘Agreement in Principle’ for Deal
VaNews/Virginia Public Access Project
Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines, which, let’s be honest, are all many of us have time to read anyway
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