Although much of my book tour for Flowers in the Gutter was cancelled due to COVID-19 lockdowns, I made this zine of Songs of the Edelweiss Pirates for people to download and print themselves and to give out for free at events. Being a musician, one of the things that appealed to me about the Pirates was how they used music as resistance. I thought that some of their songs should live on as protest music today, so I translated and notated them. I also thought the copy-paste/ black-and-white aesthetics of the zine fit with the proto-punk ethos of the Pirates. 

While almost all of my events for Flowers in the Gutter were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was able to do remote events, including this bonus video for the Gaithersburg, Maryland Book Festival. I give a brief overview of the Edelweiss Pirates and share some images from the book. 

The cover of Flowers in the Gutter, which features an illustration of an Edelweiss Pirate running away after punching a Nazis. They're on the bridge in Cologne, with the famous Kolner Dom Cathedral in the background and bombers flying overhead. 

The Spanish cover of Flowers in the Gutter, done by artist Diego Mallo. 

My books rely heavily research in both primary and secondary sources. I want readers to feel, hear, and see what my characters did; I want to immerse readers in the world that my characters inhabited. For Flowers in the Gutter, I visited the archive at the El-De Haus, which is now the Nazi Documentation Center in Cologne (pictured here). I also visited the regional archive of Nordrhein Westfalen, which holds the Gestapo archive, including the original arrest records, interrogation reports, and internal memos relating to the Edelweiss Pirates. It was both exciting and harrowing to hold the documents that were in the room with the Pirates. 

During my research for Flowers in the Gutter, I traveled to Cologne. Equally important to visiting archives for me was going to the places that the Edelweiss Pirates had been, whether in the city or in the country on one of their many hikes. They loved to escape the city and go camping, and would have been on the same trail I'm on here in the Siebengebirge (Seven Mountains) south of the city. 

Me, holding up an advance copy of Flowers in the Gutter in front of a mural in Cologne, Germany for the Edelweiss Pirates. This was during the memorial event for the murder of Edelweiss Pirates and Kristallnacht in 2019. While some people in Cologne (especially the Anti-Fascist League) are very familiar with the Edelweiss Pirates and keep their memory alive, many others are not.

At the book launch for Flowers in the Gutter with my mom, who as a former German professor helped me do research in Germany. I was lucky enough to be able to host the event at Atomic Books in Hampden, Baltimore, where the owners support many local authors. 

In 2020, Brendan O'Meara of the CNF Podcast interviewed me about Flowers in the Gutter and my research and writing process.