NILES — Bring up weather in a crowded room, and everyone will talk about it, said Missy Burns, of Niles. But have one person bring up domestic violence, and the whole room will fall silent.

This is what Burns calls “the silent epidemic.” She hopes to help end it with her new book.

“From Mayberry to Gunsmoke: Life in the Devil’s Backyard” was released Jan. 13 by God’s Word to Women, Inc., of Grapevine, Texas. It can be purchased on Amazon.

It is a memoir of Burns’ life in Pahrump, Nevada, a town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. The Niles native left her home in 1990 and moved to Pahrump, where she stayed until the 2010s.

Many of the stories in her memoir focus on abuse and domestic violence members of the community suffered from Burns’ perspective working in Christian ministry.

“Domestic violence is all around, but it lies just below the surface,” she said.

Shortly after moving to Pahrump, women in the community began opening up to Burns about intimate partner violence. She began to support them, taking domestic violence training to better understand their situations and assist them.

This eventually led her to wonder why the ministry was not doing more. As she dug into research, she found that few people in ministry nationwide were trained to properly handle abuse and that many spouses of ministers were victims of domestic violence themselves.

So, she wrote a pocket-sized book,  “The Underworld of Abuse,” in 2005 to address the issue. An educational video of the same title that draws from Jesus’ first sermon in the Bible followed in 2007.

This helped her receive a United Way award and serve on an interfaith domestic violence task force.

Now back in Niles, she runs a Facebook group called “Ask Missy,” which focuses on topics of abuse in ministry.

She also serves as an adviser for God’s Work To Women, Inc., which published her book, and its sister nonprofit, the International Christian Women’s Hall of Fame. Both seek to empower Christian women and bring their work to the larger public eye — Burns said women were often written out of the Christian community.

“From Mayberry to Gunsmoke” is part of a series of books put out by the hall of fame to the tell the stories of female movers and shakers of the Christian faith.

Burns said she had a 10,500-word length to hit, and it was more challenging than she could have imagined. She was used to writing papers a few pages long. Even “The Underworld of Abuse” was only about booklet length.

She spent spring, summer and fall of 2019 working on the book before sending it to her editor.

“I would just draw a blank,” Burns said of the writing process. “I’m not long-winded. I’m not the type that has so much to say that I have to narrow it down. I’m the type that is concise. It’s hard for me to stretch.”

What made the book more challenging was that she had never written down any of her stories before. They were either told by word of mouth to friends and family or left in her head.

A final challenge, Burns said, was writing about herself.

“To tell about yourself, it’s rather embarrassing, but if you’re going to help somebody, it’s worth it,” she said.

Burns said she hopes people in ministry will read her book so it will help them better understand the abuse that could be in their congregation or among their peers.

Writing “From Mayberry to Gunsmoke” was well worth it, Burns said, but she wishes she would have written it in the winter. She lost a few wonderful summer days sitting inside in front of a blank page.

For that reason, Burns is already planning out the summer days with rest and relaxation.