• Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, Finalist
• Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction, Finalist

Karin Martel had never considered what happened to her in ninth-grade shop class as sexual abuse. So when she sees a therapist to talk about the stress of her job as a 911 call-taker and police dispatcher, she surprises herself by suddenly bringing up the memory of the groping she endured in high school. In her job, Karin deals with victims of abuse on a regular basis but has never identified herself as one of them. Shop Class Hall Pass delves into the difficult eighteen months of therapy as she unravels the serious consequences of trauma and recognizes the impact trauma has on her callers and in her community. She also must come to terms with the realization that for thirty-five years she has been trying to fix, or control, or do, or not do whatever it was that made the boy sexually assault her all year in class, humiliating her in front of her classmates and teacher. Most importantly, Karin learns to feel compassion for her past, current, and future self.

Over and over, I feel the boy grab me from behind. I hear his laugh. I see my classmates and the teacher staring at me. And over and over my body responds with a jolt of adrenaline to my heart, my ribs squeezing the air out of my lungs, my heart trying to beat its way out of its cage. Sometimes the intrusive memories vary from the original event, to the times he held me and invited the other boys in for a feel, to the times he ambushed me in the hallway by my locker in front of friends and anyone else walking by, to the quick little drive-bys that turned into an almost-daily routine. He was like a dog pissing on a tree, marking his territory. Eventually he didn’t even need to restrain me because he’d trained the fight out of me, a self-serve grab and grope. Along with the memories come the whys. Why did I take that class? Why did I keep going back to it? Why didn’t I tell anyone? Why didn’t I know it mattered until now? Why did it take so long to realize? And along with the whys came the what ifs. What if I’d told someone other than the teacher? What if I’d quit the class? What if I’d fought harder? What if I’d never stopped fighting?