If you have ambitions to write, get published and grow famous and wealthy, you’re in (partial) luck: Bend organization Central Oregon Writers Guild is here to help with the first two parts of your quest. This weekend, the group will host one of its quarterly workshops, this one with novelist and frequent Bend visitor T. Geronimo Johnson.

A longstanding faculty member of Oregon State University-Cascades’ low-residency MFA program in creative writing, Johnson will appear in the live Zoom program “Engaging Your Readers with T. Geronimo Johnson.” The program is $10 for members and $25 for nonmembers.

Bend fiction writer Mike Cooper, president of Central Oregon Writers Guild and a teacher of writing at OSU-Cascades and Central Oregon Community College, said COWG tries to land interesting people from around the writing and publishing industry to present in its workshops.

Along with such programs, the guild’s website, centraloregonwritersguild.com, is a repository of writing treasures: You can see a list and click through previous programs dated back to April 2020, when the programs went to Zoom, at centraloregonwritersguild.com. The site also hosts a calendar of writing-related events and resources.

Cooper and his wife, Irene Cooper, are graduates of the OSU-Cascades MFA program and were in the first cohort when the program launched in 2013-14. They are listed in the resources for their workshops, coaching and more, alongside editors, ghostwriters and book designers.

The Writers Guild was founded in 2002, and today has 140 dues-paying members and reaches a sum of 550 via email, according to Cooper.

It is also a trove of fellow writers and publishing professionals, said publicity director Julie Swearingen, whose position is voluntary — as is Cooper’s and all of the active board members.

“We have members who are editors, who are designers and do the cover and layout of the book, and can help people self-publish all the way through to the end,” Swearingen said. “The name Writers Guild almost doesn’t explain it all, because there are so many people who are members or who are on the board that can really talk about every aspect of publishing.”

Member writers land in all genres and subgenres of writing, Cooper said.

Poetry, nonfiction, fiction, genre-specific, crime, mystery — we had a Western writer,” Cooper said. “That’s why we try to focus more on craft, because we want to look more at the big picture of writing, rather than something super-specific, ‘How to write a crime novel,’ or something like that.”

Member dues are $25 a year, but its monthly meetings on the second Tuesday of each month are free.

“The real benefit to the membership is cheaper workshops,” said Cooper, who said that, come January, COWG will begin to hold limited in-person meetings for the first time in nearly two years. They’ll also be livestreamed on Zoom.

COWG will partner with Deschutes Public Library, which has its own writing-related series of events and offerings, Write Here, on a writing critique effort in the new year.

“That’s one of the nice things, I think, about the way we work here in Bend,” Cooper said. “It’s not everybody wanting to have their own piece of the pie. I think it’s all one sort of big, shared pie.”

Central Oregon has developed a great writing community, he said.

“I come across people that have been in writing workshops, or part of the writers guild, or part of the Write Here programs, or COCC’s Continuing Ed writing programs … who have formed little critique groups based on those experiences,” Cooper said. “They’re just everywhere. I literally walked into a coffee shop last week, and I saw three people sitting down writing, and I knew all of them. They’d created their own little group, so it’s good. It’s a good thing. I like to see that happening.”