Heart of the Nation: Secrets in a postcard

FOR the past nine years, secrets have been dropping through the letterbox at Frank Warren's home in a suburb of Washington DC.

postcards

FOR the past nine years, secrets have been dropping through the letterbox at Frank Warren's home in a suburb of Washington DC.

They're written on postcards adorned with home-made art, and they're anonymous; they come from all over the world. Each of them offers an intimate glimpse into the heart of a stranger. Some of the secrets are tragic, others hopeful or poignant or shocking or laugh-out-loud funny. A large proportion of them come from Australia.

PostSecret began as an art project, and as an antidote to a tedious day job that "involved lots of photocopying", says Warren, 49. Back in 2004 he began handing out blank, self-addressed postcards to strangers in the street: send me a secret, he'd say, something you've never told another soul. As the trickle of responses turned into a flood, it became clear he'd tapped into a deep, mysterious seam in the human psyche. He's been sent more than half a million postcards over the years, and they're still arriving at the rate of several hundred a week. He shares the best online at PostSecret.com, which claims to be the "largest advertisement-free blog in the world", with a visitor count nudging 600 million.

Warren, who's currently in Australia for the first time, giving a series of talks, says sharing a secret with a stranger is a "subversive" act, and powerfully cathartic. "All of us keep secrets, because we fear judgment from our community, our family and friends," he says. "The secrets we bottle up inside us feel like walls that divide us from others - but if we can find the courage to let go, we discover that they're not walls but bridges that connect us to others and to our deepest selves." The cloak of anonymity helps, of course.

PostSecret combines two very different forms of communication - the old-school ritual of writing a postcard, and the instant, global reach of the internet - and interestingly it's the former that most enthuses this online entrepreneur. He loves the way the space limitations of a postcard mean words and images must be distilled to their essence. He calls the best examples "graphic haikus".

The biggest theme to emerge from this grand project?

A yearning for intimacy. "So many people are searching for that one person they can tell all their secrets to," says Warren, who's been married to Jan for 23 years and has a teenage daughter and a dog at home. "PostSecret is just an insufficient surrogate until they find that person."

Click here for tickets to Frank Warren's talk at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, on Wednesday April 17.