News > September 4, 2008

By Lauren Dayton | Staff writer

Do you have a secret? If so, you have something in common with the thousands of people who have revealed their deepest secrets through a Web site called the PostSecret Project.

Its founder and curator, Frank Warren, will speak on his journey as an “accidental artist” and the power of secrets at 7 p.m. on Sept. 9 in Brendle Recital Hall. His award-winning program is a multimedia presentation in which he shares many of the secrets that were kept out of the books. The event is free and open to the public. PostSecret.com, Warren’s project, encourages anyone to reveal secrets through words, sketches, or images on a 4-inch by 6-inch postcard and mail anonymously to him.

The only requirements are that the secret be true and that it be revealed for the first time through the postcard. Every week Warren receives 100 to 200 postcards and updates the Web site with 10 to 20 of these each Sunday.

The site began as a community art project in November of 2004. Warren handed out pre-addressed post-cards to strangers in Metro stations around his hometown of Washington, D.C. He then displayed them in an exhibit at Artomatic, an annual art show in Washington where anyone can exhibit for a small fee. Even after the four-week exhibition ended, Warren continued to receive postcards. So he launched the blog-style Web site and since then has collected more than 175,000 postcards and the site has received nearly 100 million hits.

The widespread popularity of the Web site has allowed the project to cross media genres: it made an appearance in the All-American Rejects’ music video for their hit song, Dirty Little Secret.

Warren has also made many television and radio appearances, including the Today Show, Good Morning America, 20/20, CNN, MSNBC, CBC, NPR, Fox News and the BBC.

The Web site also inspired Warren to publish a series of books, including A Lifetime of Secrets, PostSecret, My Secret and The Secret Lives of Men and Women. Each of the books includes selections of the postcards that Warren has received over the past four years.

Warren will sign copies of his books after the event, and there will be books available for purchase. The postcard submissions range from cute to quixotic to sinister.

Some recent messages include “I lied. I am giving away things in prep for suicide,” “Pregnant women remind me of my failures” and “I wish you could see me now. You’d be proud, Dad.”

When asked about the power of his project in an article in USA Today, Warren explained, “People are drawn to this because it’s something powerful and raw and real that speaks to them.

“I try to keep it ideologically neutral and juxtapose the cards in a way that’s balanced and non-judgmental.” Warren was born in Arizona and went to high school in Illinois.

He later graduated from Uuniversity of California at Berkeley with a degree in the Social Sciences and moved to the Washington D.C. area to start a business. Fifteen years later, Instant Information Systems, his small business, has taken a backseat to PostSecret, the project that thrust him into the public eye. The Web site has garnered numerous awards: in 2006 it won five Bloggies, the most distinguished weblog awards ceremony, including Weblog of the Year and Best American Weblog. That same year the National Mental Health Association presented Warren with a special award for his active support of the organization Hopeline/ 1-800-SUICIDE through the PostSecret Web site.

The event is sponsored by Student Union, which has been planning it since last April.

Sophomore Gabriella Almeida, lectures chair for Student Union, said, “We’ve already seen a lot of interest in this lecture from the public, and we’re very positive that the event will be a big success.”