The PostSecret blog phenomenon will come to Dartmouth this Thursday, when the web site's creator, Frank Warren, brings his 2009 tour to Spaulding Auditorium in the Hopkins Center. Each week, Warren receives thousands of secrets in postcard form and, with some help from his wife, sifts through the mail to select 20 confessions to post online. Over the past four years, the blog has attracted both national and international attention, spawning three books and a handful of foreign spin-offs. As his publisher puts it in the forward to Warren's book "PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives," Warren is the "most trusted stranger in America."
The Dartmouth's Allison Levy spoke with Warren over the phone about Thursday's event, the significance of the postcard medium and even a secret of his own.
The Dartmouth: Where did you first get the idea for PostSecret?
Frank Warren: PostSecret started in November 2004 as an art project. I printed up self-addressed postcards inviting people to share a secret with me and handed them out, and soon after that people began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards. In the past four years I've received over 400,000 from around the world.
TD: What made you decide to use the postcard as your medium? Why not just a plain piece of paper, or anything else, really?
FW: I think there's something special about the postcard -- it's a finite amount of space and it forces you to choose your words and your images carefully to express how you really feel.
TD: As you probably know, the event is being sponsored by Dartmouth's Active Minds chapter, which deals with increasing mental health awareness on campus.
FW: Yes, I'm familiar with Active Minds and I really admire their work. I'm very pleased to be associated with them.
TD: When you started out, did you know that so many of the secrets would touch on mental illness? Are these heavy secrets what you expected?
FW: Well, I get all kinds of secrets " funny secrets, sexual secrets, hopeful secrets -- as well as the secrets that are heavy or filled with anguish. When I started the project, I was a volunteer answering phones on a suicide prevention hotline. And when the web site started getting millions of hits, I knew I wanted to use it to promote suicide prevention and raise funds for that cause, rather than put ads on the web site. That's just been a path that I've stayed on for four years. In fact, in four years, the PostSecret community has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for suicide prevention. I'm very proud of that ... Also, I think it's not surprising that so many secrets are heavy, because when we have information that's hopeful or makes us feel good, we're quick to share it with everyone. It's the secrets that make us feel alone or embarrassed that we keep to ourselves typically.
TD: A month or so ago on the site, there was an e-mail message from a reader whose mom thought all the secrets were written by the same person because they have a similar voice. That's something that's really striking for me. It's true that there's this cadence that unites the secrets. Can you comment on that a little bit?
FW: Yeah, I think there's a lot to that question. Even though the secrets might be very specific and individual, if you look at the deeper emotions, you can see how they connect and they remind us of how we share so much in common beneath the surface.
TD: Can you tell us what we can expect out of Thursday's event?
FW: Speaking on college campuses is my favorite part of the project now. I love to share the inspirational and funny stories behind the secrets. I like showing everybody the postcards that have been banned from the book by the publisher. And then at the end of the talk, too, it's always very encouraging to have young people come up and share their secrets in front of all their classmates.
TD: I heard about that segment and was somewhat surprised with it. It seems like such a huge difference from the anonymity of mailing in a postcard to a stranger. Why do you think we're still so willing to share our secrets?
FW: I think it just demonstrates how there's a generational shift happening in the world now. Young people have more courage in talking about parts of their private lives that older people would never share.
TD: You must get this all the time, but do you personally have a secret?
FW: I think we all have secrets. [On Thursday,] I'll talk about the secret I kept from myself for over 20 years. It's actually in the first book.
TD: So what is it?
FW: Oh, you have to come to the event to hear it. If I told you now it would be like spoiling the end of a movie.
TD: In addition to touring for PostSecret, what have you been up to lately?
FW: What's taking up a lot of my time is assembling post cards for the new PostSecret book that's coming out later this year. It's called "Confessions on Life, Death, and God."
TD: What sort of secrets does it include?
FW: It's like the secrets you see on the web site, but I've also included secrets that have to do with our personal faiths and private beliefs about God and the afterlife.
TD: Can you give an example?
FW: I got this card a couple days ago that says, "Me and my friends get bored in church, so during the songs we always clap off beat."
TD: Finally, is there a favorite secret that you've received?
FW: One that made my blood cold was a secret that read, "Everyone that knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead."
Tickets for the event are free to undergraduate students and are available at the Collis information desk.
