Preaching in My Yes Dress: Confessions of a Reluctant Pastor

Finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Autobiography & Memoir category

Longlisted for the 2017 Chautauqua Prize presented by the Chautauqua Institution

After a series of childhood misfortunes–her father's death, her mother's ill-advised love affair, her disabled sister wrecking the family GTO–self-avowed church-geek Jo Page decided it was her job to figure out how to stay on God's good side and maybe spare the family any more tragedy. But she was a girl. And a Lutheran. That ruled out the Roman Catholic sisterhood as so quasi-erotically portrayed by Audrey Hepburn in Page's favorite movie, The Nun's Story. Though women were ordained in the larger branch of the Lutheran church, when Page's own pastor handed her a brochure enumerating all the ways in which she, as a female, was to be silent and submissive, she gave up on the church and went off in search of sex and drugs and rock-and-roll like any rejected adolescent Lutheran girl would.

Eventually Page found her way back into the church and ultimately into ordained ministry, spending twenty years in the ecclesiastical trenches, presiding over life's rituals and preaching compulsory weekly words of hope she wasn't sure she even believed.

Comical, provocative, and heartbreaking,
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