Blog of the Week: Frank Warren at PostSecret

About a year ago, the 41-year-old owner of a document delivery business in Germantown, MD, printed 3,000 postcards with a message that invited their finders to write a personal, anonymous secret on the blank side and mail it back to him. Frank Warren left the postcards in art galleries, restaurants, between pages of library books and on subway seats. And as the postcards started trickling back to his mailbox, he began posting a few of them each week at what has become one of the web's most popular blogs: PostSecret.

PostSecret ranks 55th among BlogPulse's top 10,000 blogs (view profile), and it's soon to emerge as a hardcover book, PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives (HarperCollins, Nov. 29 publication). The project combines art, poetry and psychological candor in ways that few other endeavors have, and that's what makes it so fascinating to Warren, a self-described "accidental artist." (Some recent secrets on the blog, where about 20 new cards are posted each week: "By the time you read this, I'll be drunk again." "I've been giving oral sex to a pastor for the past 5 years. He's married. I don't believe in God." "I am a breast cancer survivor. Sometimes I wish the cancer had killed me." And on a New Yorker subscription card: "I think it makes me look smart to subscribe. But I only like to read the cartoons!").

One LiveJournaler calls the site "voyeuristic"; the blogger at Canned Platypus is drawn in because it captures both the "richness and weirdness of the human experience." Warren talks about the project's unexpected popularity and appeal.

Q. How many entries have you received for PostSecret?
A. "Even though I quit handing out postcards after the first 3,000, people started home-making their own postcards and mailing them to me. I started getting postcards not only from the immediate area, but from all over the country and from other countries as well. When I started the blog, I posted a goal of trying to receive 365 secrets before the end of this year. The year hasn't ended yet, and I have over 10,000."

Q. What's been the most surprising thing to you about this entire project?
A. "I'm not shocked any more, but I am surprised every day. I'm surprised at how candid people can be...the raw honesty and different kinds of surprises that arrive every day. Some of the postcards are funny, some are filled wiht anguish and remorse, some of the cards tend to feel like they're from people who are working out how best to deal with their own secret as they confess it to somebody else, and some look like they're sent by people who are searching for absolution."

Q. What effect has PostSecret had on you personally?
A. "Sometimes, I feel this project picked me instead of me picking it. After I started receiving secrets in the mail, some of them reminded me of secrets in my own life that I hadn't even acknowledged to myself. A humiliating childhood experience I hadn't told anyone about for 30 years sort of bubbled up. I wrote that secret down on a postcard and shared it with my daughter and my wife, and I mailed it to myself. That card has become part of the project. Sometimes I wonder if the reason I started this project was because there was this secret inside of me, below my own awareness, that was trying to get out and let me come to terms with it. But that's a pretty complex way for it to be recognized and dealt with."

Q. How do you explain PostSecret's popularity and appeal?
A. " The broadness of the interests and the different types of people participating in this project has been surprising. It wasn't that long ago when I was called by MTV2...they wanted me to do a piece on the PostSecret project. Later that same day, I had a meeting with the web director of the AARP, because they wanted to do something about PostSecret, too. That's how broad the interest has been."

Q. The confessoins run the gamut of emotions and experiences...how do you explain that?
A. "Sometimes people visit the site and might initially come there thinking it's going to be some kind of vicarious thrill, but after they read a few of the secrets, they start to recognize their own secret or the common humanity that they're sharing with these strnagers. They can read something that touches them deeper than things they've talked about with close friends and family. The Internet can foster real human connection."

Q. What have you learned from the project about human secrets?
A. "There are two kinds...ones we keep from others, and the ones that we hide from ourselves. I like to receive and post secrets that are joyful and happy and optimistic and talk about an unseen kindness performed, but I don't get a lot of those. I think it's because by nature, secrets are those things that we feel shameful about and hide, or if we do have positive things like that happen to us, we're more likely to share them with our friends rather than bottle them up inside."

Q. How much time does it take to manage PostSecret?
A. "I get about 350 postcards a week now. I spend more time on PostSecret now than I do my own business, and my business was a lot more profitable before this project, but I feel this is part of the mission. It gives me a lot of gratification doing this kind of work. I get a lot of e-mails from people who talk about an experience of healing, or how mailing in a postcard allowed them to face their secret and deal with it, release it, literally and figuratively. That makes me feel good..."