The Writing Class “I hope all of you got some writing done this past week.” Our writing teacher smiled at us from her desk at the front of the classroom as we shifted nervously in our seats.
“You DID all write something, didn’t you? Who wants to share first?”
I slumped in my seat, trying to become invisible behind the student seated at the desk ahead of me.
“John. How about you? You usually have something interesting to read. Why don’t you go first?”
With my powers of invisibility unceremoniously defeated, I sat upright, looked pleadingly at the teacher, and mumbled, “Uh, I didn’t get anything finished for today. I started a few pieces, but none of it is done.”
“Well then, go ahead and read one of your unfinished pieces, and maybe we can give you some helpful suggestions about how to carry on.”
She wasn’t going to be thrown off the chase quite so easily as I had hoped.
“My notebook is at home. I forgot to bring it today” I lied.
“What’s that sitting in front of you on your desk? Isn’t that your writing pad? Read us what you have written there.”
This lady was NOT going to give up.
“But this is for geography class. It’s not writing. It’s just a description of a place in Peru.”
“Ahh! A description. Good. Go ahead and read us what you have so far.”
“OK. It’s really not finished, and it’s not creative writing, it’s geography. But, if you insist, here goes:”
In the Peruvian Mountain village of Pisac, the marketplace filled the town square, spilling down the side streets, and into some of the normally private courtyards that opened onto the square. There were some sellers at the market every day, but Sunday was the biggest day of the week.
On Sunday, the tourists came to shop. The locals came to shop, too. Many more merchants came to sell their wares. There were farmers with crops of every kind; corn and potatoes; milk and eggs. There was meat, just butchered this morning; freshly baked bread; and all sorts of local cuisine, grilled, steamed, or roasted right in the square.
An entire row at one side of the marketplace was devoted to weavers. Dressed in traditional garb, they had primitive looms set up where they demonstrated their skills, and offered finished goods for sale.
While there were lots of handcrafted items for sale, many of the market stalls sold crafts that had been manufactured elsewhere, bought at wholesale prices, and offered for sale here as original work. Questions about workmanship were often met with statements such as: “My brother made that bracelet.” “My father makes those pots”. “My sister wove that.”
Occasionally, the stories were true, but mostly not - a point made all too clear when we came upon several different booths offering the same blanket design, each one claiming it as their family’s original creation. The telltale label still attached to one of these “hand-made” blankets revealed the truth: “made in Indonesia”.
“That’s all I have so far, teach. It’s from a trip I took to Peru several years ago. Spent a couple weeks there. One week in the Amazon jungle, and the next week up in the Andes mountains. We even went to Macchu Picchu.”
“One of these days I’ll do some creative writing about the whole trip. But for now, I’m just writing down some stuff for geography class.”
by John R. Cumbow, 2007
