Photos by Jared Hamilton

Upcoming events from Bad Branch Institute!

Bad Branch Institute

(Education Wing)

The Bad Branch Institute aims to utilize the arts in workshops and educational programs that promote environmental justice and sustainability—to be good stewards—as individuals, as communities, and as public policy. We do this in conjunction with the other three wings of the MARS Collective and other organizations such as WMMT_FM/Appalshop, the Urban Appalachian Community Council, the Appalachian Studies Association, KFTC, and the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. That Wiley’s Last Resort founder, Jim Webb, was actively engaged with such groups is no coincidence—through music, visual arts, literature, and scholarship, they reflect his dedication to the mountains and to the people who call it home.

Kentucky’s Pine Mountain, being a hundred-mile long range, founders Jim Webb & Scott Goebel settled on the name Bad Branch Institute to more specifically connect it to place—Bad Branch Falls, near the Virginia border, is one of Kentucky’s wonders and is only a crow’s mile away.

The first writer gatherings, in conjunction with the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC), took place on Pine Mountain in 2005, usually during the Seedtime Festival or on bookending weekends around the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman. These gatherings led to the SAWC-supported building of the writer’s cabin (Elmo’s Haven*) in 2012. The cabin houses a good collection of regional publications and is currently used for day retreats and meeting space. As facilities develop, we hope to offer weekend workshops, retreats, as well as weeklong residencies for the region’s activists and writers.

*As with many of the place names at Wiley’s Last Resort, the cabin’s name connects with something important; In this case, Jim Webb’s play, Elmo’s Haven, first performed in Williamson, West (by God) Virginia in the late 70s. The play’s title was a pun, riffing on the opening line in John Denver’s song, Take Me Home, Country Roads. Webb was always one to build on a good pun. The first location where the cabin was almost (but not) built), the highest point at Wiley’s Last Resort, was named “Almost Haven.” The long lane rising up to Elmo’s Haven was appropriately christened the Stairway to Haven.