How Meatyard made a stage set of his native region to portray his circle of friends and compose his eerie tableaux. The book looks at the pictures he made in and around Lexington, where he found abandoned houses in the countryside to use as sets and directed friends and family members in scenes that suggest both ritual and theatre. Establishing mood with natural light, he used masks, dolls and found objects as unsettling props and mined architectural detail for abstract compositional elements. He drew inspiration from many sources: an autodidact in fields as diverse as jazz, painting, literature, history and Zen Buddhism, he found in his voracious reading endless ideas for his carefully constructed pictures. His process was also shaped by a constant dialogue with his Kentucky peers: the writer, environmental activist and farmer Wendell Berry, the photographers Van Deren Coke and Robert C. May, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, the painter Frederic Thursz and the writer and philosopher Guy Davenport. The catalogue accompanied the exhibition at the University of Kentucky Art Museum, which travelled to the Bates College Museum of Art in Maine.