Interview
Jody Diperna Interviews Amy Jo Burns
By Jody DiPerna
Two singer-songwriters take center stage in her most recent novel, “Wait for Me” (Celedon Books, 2026), and though some of the story takes place in West Virginia and Nashville, it is all inspired by Burns’ childhood in the thickets of her northern Appalachia. The homey comforts of Ed Ochester, Maggie Anderson and Richard Hague echo in her rolling prose as she lays down track.
Young women, old women, working women. Women who take the power denied them, women who want nothing more than to disappear, and women who fight for their families. Women who try and fail and abide. These women anchor the stories Amy Jo Burns tells with exquisite tenderness.
“I go home to western Pennsylvania and all I want to do is listen to country music,” she said.
In 1973, singer-songwriter Elle Harlow was at the top of the country charts, singing at the Grand Ole Opry. And the next day, she just vanished. Gone. Not a trace of her to be found. We’re introduced to her legacy in the garage and ad hoc museum full of the Elle Harlow bric-a-brac collected by Abe Shaw in 1995. Maryjohn Shaw spends her days working at her dad’s gas station and making music with her one-of-a-kind mandolin with her friend Laz. Though Maryjohn never knew her mother, her father Abe is as steady and reliable as the Ohio River. Abe says Harlow stopped at his small-town, roadside gas station before she vanished. He says he was the last person to see her.
These characters came to Burns at a time when writing slipped through fingers. Her close friend and mentor had just died and she tried writing about it–writing had always been the way she mediated the world–but at this moment, it failed her utterly. She worried that she would never write again. Still, she wrote down snippets, phrases and flashes of ideas. It did not hold together the way a book’s narrative needs to, but those written keepsakes floating in her notebook were the voices of Elle Harlow and Maryjohn Shaw. It was the start of “Wait for Me.”
“A lot of the lyrics were written before I grew to really understand what the story itself was and what I wanted it to do,” Burns said.
When she realized she had two songwriters on her hands, she wanted to know more. She had never tried anything like it before, never dipped her toes into poetry. Burns and I have spoken several times about our shared love of Loretta Lynn and she read Lynn’s three memoirs to get inside the head of this kind of artist. She read other books by or about Dolly Parton, Brandi Carlisle, and Linda Ronstadt. She got herself a subscription to American Songwriter Magazine.
“What is the life your favorite song lived before anybody ever heard it?” Burns wondered.
Maryjohn creates music, but she struggles, too. She wants people to hear her songs, but the business, the industry, is daunting. Her songs are beautiful, a slice of herself served up through guitar and mandolin. To commodify this? Where would one even start?
“There’s this other world out there where people are sharing their art on a much wider scale. Can I even get there from here? There’s not a road that leads there,” Burns said.
Maryjohn and Laz go deep into the woods to play music together, some that Maryjohn has written. These are the sorts of lost woods you find in western Pennsylvania–not park land or land with no trespassing signs–just unregulated woods. Maryjohn thinks of these as hers. There are places here which still feel wild and undiscovered, even though more often than not, they are being fracked or used to route gas pipelines, but that childhood feeling of being alone in the woods is special.
“It feels like nobody owns these, and then, therefore I own them, because I go in and I have this very special, particular experience. So much of what I’m always trying to do in my books is to write from the inside out,” Burns said.
She herself grew up in these kinds of “undiscovered” woods, whiling away her teen summers there, in nature’s shopping mall. A meteor crashes into the lost woods where Maryjohn and Laz are singing and it turns Maryjohn’s world upside down. She is territorial about these woods now teaming with people after the meteor strike. The intruders tromp through, as invasive as Japanese knotweed and as careless as the national media descending on the region every four years. It feels wrong.
“I wanted to get across what it feels like to be somebody who lives in an area like that and to have people descend and then leave—how irritatingly transparent it is. Just, we all know what you’re doing here,” Burns said.
This is Amy Jo Burns’ third book set in this slice of northern Appalachia where she grew up. Her family lived in the gravitational pull of the Sharon Steel works located in Mercer County which started operations in 1900. During World War II, the plant made steel used for military helmets. In the late 1960s, Sharon Steel employed 10,000 people.
The company declared bankruptcy and ceased operation in 1992 after it was ordered by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to stop their unconscionable disposal practices. According to the EPA, Sharon Steel took rail cars full of waste across the Shenango River and discarded it down embankments. Slag and dross was piled into large mounds. The soil, sediment and groundwater were all contaminated with hazardous chemicals on land between the Ohio border and the Shenango River, which spanned 330 acres, including 100 acres of wetlands. The EPA added the site to the Superfund program’s National Priorities List in 1998.
That mill closure happened when Burns was just a kid. The adults walked about in a sort of shellshock, visibly trying to feel the ground under their feet. Her mom told her she assumed there would always be work in the mill. Growing up in a small steel town myself, I know the feeling. So many of us do. If I grew up during the deathbed watch for steel, Burns grew up at the actual wake. This was the sliding out time, the period after the rug had long been pulled, but everybody was still looking for it.
How can something so huge be so provisional? So fleeting?
“That’s exactly what I was born into—the whiplash—that transition everybody was having to go through. Sort of like the grief of losing the patriarch or the matriarch that I never met. You’re there for the scattering, but you never knew what it was like before,” she said.
In 2023, she published Mercury, a novel about a family roofing business. Set in Mercury, a fictional town which stands in for her childhood home, Marley West marries into the Joseph Brothers Roofing business and takes on the kind of labor that goes unaccounted for. It’s the kind of labor Burns grew up around in a place where the women kept it all together. Marley teaches herself book-keeping and marketing and gets the business in order in a way that takes some serious executive savvy and yet when she wants to be paid for her work, her request is met with bewilderment. The breadth and depth of her skill set is just not recognized, even though Marley herself sees it.
“They are women who don’t get off the clock. They are roofers, in the sense of, they are answering the phone calls, figuring out insurance, handling payroll. They are making sure dinner is on the table, handling childcare and they’re doing it without really having the option of saying, no,” Burns said.
This is the first time roofers took center stage in any literature which has landed on my desk and Burns felt they deserved a place on the shelf, too. Her dad was a roofer and he told her about going to fix the roofs of old businesses which were closed down. This roofing work felt like performing a post-mortem on buildings which were part of the body of the community.
“He would step in. Completely empty, lights off, there’d be a lunch pail and a chair just left there. He said he felt he witnessed the death of all these places now. But slowly those things have been in a process of transformation and he was a part of that—caring for those buildings, repairing the roof, making sure they stood strong through whatever. But for him, it felt like a real death at the time,” Burns said.
Burns told me she is often asked about the region or, to be clear, asked to be a spokesperson, a role she resists. She knows there is not just one answer to any of these questions. One size fits all doesn’t serve anybody. People often ask why didn’t people just move, unaware of the financial cost of trying to uproot one’s whole life, to say nothing of what you might leave behind. Like Burns’ Maryjohn, I wondered where the roads that led to escape were? More importantly, would it really be better? What might one lose in the process?
“Exactly that feeling is what I like to write about, that sort of emptiness. I get asked what inspires me and people are always surprised when I say abandoned buildings. I find them very inspiring,” Burns said.
Her first book, Cinderland is a memoir about growing during this time of economic sliding when another event tore her town apart. The local piano teacher was accused of sexually assaulting female students. Though he eventually pled guilty and served a short prison sentence, the seven girls who spoke out were ostracized, discredited and accused of smearing a good man’s reputation. The other girls, all of whom were questioned, lied. Of this, Burns wrote:
“When each of our turns came to be questioned, the lies spilled out so easily we suspected they’d been planted long ago. There were few girls— seven, to be exact— bold enough to tell the truth, but their soft-voiced protests were almost drowned out by those of us unable to defy a town rallying behind one of its own. Though we were just ten, eleven, twelve years old, it became quite clear that men like Mr. Lotte secured a kind of protection that girls like us never could.”
The adults just could not accept— would not accept— that a respected, trusted man in their community would do this. The treatment of the girls who spoke out was scary enough that the rest of the girls, Amy and her peers, lied in order to avoid that harsh fate. This is a story as old as time and one that reflects America both then and now, in cities and small towns. Sacrifices must be made to maintain the status quo and sense of security, no matter how fraudulent.The lives of a few girls is a small price to pay for such false comforts.
“Everybody’s just looking for something to hold on to. In my hometown, it felt like we might be losing all these things, but we still have our values. We still have this sense that this is a great place to raise kids, this is a morally protected place and for that to also get attacked …” Burns said, trailing off.
In Wait for Me, the realization that so many people are out scouring the woods looking for some space rock, but nobody ever looked for Elle Harlow, nearly levels Abe Shaw. It fills him with a deep pain, but also speaks to something larger–the disposability of women and girls. The disposability of artists, too.
With western Pennsylvania as her muse, Burns writes these patches of land far enough out from the city that they are not suburban or even exurban, but just small places I pass along the road where I want to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. “I’m from nowhere. Are you from nowhere, too?”
But with Burns writing, they aren’t nowhere, they are places with real economic struggles and sometimes despair, but also hope and strength. On Burns’ pages, they are places where people work and get married and teach and have kids and get divorced and make art and live complex lives.
She captures something about this place, the part that sticks. No matter how many thousands of showers and baths later, it’s the dirt that’s still under my fingernails. Nowhere Western Pennsylvania is the loamy smell of dense woods that comes to me in dreams. It is the cacophony of my youth: the sound of the steel mill, but also the various crickets (tree, field and house) trilling like the string section in an orchestra, punctuated with the trimeter of the katydids.
Burns said, “I love to write about home. My hometown will always be my first love and my first heartbreak. It’s always about that little nowhere place in western Pennsylvania, because it was everything to me, and it was everything to everybody else who lived there.”
This interview is re-plublished from The Pittsburgh Review of Books, March 31, 2026.
Jody DiPerna
Jody DiPerna is a writer and award-winning journalist. She has covered the literature, incarceration, criminal justice, sports and done historical deep dives for more than 20 years. Her work in progress, All We Have Is Each Other: a Journey Through Literary Appalachia, will be published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2027. Reported and memoir, it is a reflection on Appalachian writing and the importance of books in creating vibrant, healthy communities everywhere. She has just started work on The Appalachian Cities Project, An Anthology of Nonfiction from Appalachian Cities to be published by McFarland Press.