When you're a 34-year-old screenwriter and director, chances are you're doing something right when Sam Shepard says you've written one of the best scripts he's seen "in a long, long time" and agrees to appear in your independent film (alongside a couple of actors named Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon). When that film premiers at Cannes and draws rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic . . . well, you know you're doing something right. 

So who's behind all this? A modest man from Little Rock who insisted on filming his third film in Arkansas. His name is Jeff Nichols. We like him. So will you.

The Oxford American & SoLost got exclusive access to the set of his new film Mud and found out more about this talented filmmaker. Join us, won't you?

Renowned photographers Walker Evans and William Christenberry have found great beauty in Hale County, Alabama; they made some of their best-known work in this famously poor region, where they found inspiration in its simple architecture and in the faces of its people. Yet it was a utilitarian structure and its long-ago date with a tornado that fascinated photographer Timothy Hursley. Why—and how—has he photographed a silo almost a million times? Watch and see.

Xavier Castillo is a shy and enigmatic man. He works in the back corner of a modest second-floor work space, hidden away in a nondescript building in San Antonio's Beacon Hill neighborhood. Xavier would be easy to overlook if it weren't for the fact that he crafts some of the most elaborate dresses in the world for a century-old San Antonio society event called the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo.

The dresses are stunning works of art that are bizarre in their intricacy and mind-blowing in their ambition. They weigh fifty pounds. They're fifteen feet long. The design process can stretch over three years, and the fashioning of a single dress can take eight months-involving, among other things, more than 200,000 hand-stitched sequins.

At the helm? Xavier, the master. Meet him here and learn all about this new king of queens.

Louviere + Vanessa. Where to begin, really?

What do they do? What DON'T they do?

Artists? Yes. Filmmakers? Uh-huh. Photographers? Double yep. Musicians? Fifty-percent yes. Collaborators? Well yeah, but somehow the word collaborator doesn't quite capture the spirit of the whole endeavor... More like the happy warriors of the trippy, gothic periphery of photographic culture.

Were you also wondering if they might be descendants from wolves. Answer? Quite possibly....

And of COURSE they're in New Orleans. Where better to weave their darkly joyful photographic and film-based semi-narratives.

Married too. Met while Jeff was studying painting at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) and together ever since.

For ten years the couple has been making eye-popping imagery using a series of obscure (or self-invented) photographic processes to fashion some of the more fascinating imagery you've ever seen. Now, with a ten-year retrospective at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, we decided to catch up with the irrepressible dynamic duo.

Picture yourself in the '80s. In rural Tennessee. You're a Vietnam vet. You've been partying ever since you got back.

Now picture yourself waking up from a drug overdose. And you're lying on the floor of a wood structure. It's sixty feet off the ground and there's no one else around. It's a treehouse.

So you tell God if he let you live, you'll change your ways.

Soon after, you burn the treehouse to the ground.

And then the vision comes. God wants you to build another treehouse. The largest treehouse that's ever been.

And so you do.

If that is you, then your name is Horace Burgess of Crossville, Tennessee.

What does your creation look like? See it here.