By JIM GENARO

Everyone has secrets, and the act of revealing those secrets — even anonymously — can change lives, according to Frank Warren.

The founder of the anonymous-confession Web site PostSecret discussed the site and the power of telling secrets during a talk at the Grey Eagle in Asheville on Nov. 30. About 200 people attended the event, which was part of a traveling speaking tour with the publishers of Found magazine.

Warren described himself as “kind of this world-class expert in taking secrets.” The title is fitting: More than 190,000 people have sent him anonymous confessions on postcards since he began the collecting them in November 2004.

PostSecret began as an art project for Artomatic, a five-week, multimedia arts event held annually in the Washington, D.C., area. Warren went into the city armed with 100 blank postcards and approached people on the street saying, “My name is Frank, and I collect secrets.”

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Warren said he “always made sure those people got postcards because they have the best ones.”

After he displayed the postcards he received in the mail for the Artomatic exhibit, Warren said he thought the project was over. However, he soon began receiving more secrets in the mail.
“People began to buy their own postcards, and somehow the idea of secret postcards started to spread virally,” he told the audience.

Warren began receiving confessions from all over the world, often written on cards with relevant images and clip art. So, he set up a Web site to display them.

The response has been tremendous, he said. Since 2004, more than 100 million visitors have come to his site at www.postsecret.blogspot.com, and Warren receives 100-200 post cards per day.

The postcards’ messages are incredibly diverse, he said, from poignant confessions of inner struggles to humorous ones about everyday secrets.

A recent postcard showed pictures from the war in Iraq, with the confession, “I have seen combat in Iraq ... but I have never been kissed.”

Another one that Warren received was written on a piece of packing tape from an airport baggage check. It read, “You called me an idiot, so I sent your bags to the wrong destination. I guess you were right.”

One card showed the smoldering World Trade Center towers. It read, “Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I’m dead.”

People have shown great creativity with the actual cards, as well, Warren said. He has received messages on hotel key cards, sonograms, wedding invitations and nude Polaroid pictures.

One person even sent him a confession on a bag of coffee. It said, “Where I work, for whatever reason, they don’t take inventory. So, enjoy 16 ounces of our fine dark roast.”

Warren attributes the site’s rapid growth and popularity to the Internet’s ability to empower people to express themselves to a wide audience. Web logs like PostSecret are “a new kind of communication technology ... that are allowing everyday people like you and me to come up with these projects and reach people all over the world,” he said.

However, Warren also has taken the PostSecret project out of the virtual realm with four books of selected postcards, published by HarperCollins. The most recent book, “A Lifetime of Secrets” chronicles secrets from people at various ages from young children to elderly people, sorted by age.

Warren said that when making the leap from Web site to print, he encountered a number of challenges.

“On the Web right now, it’s like the wild, wild West,” he joked. When the books were published, he had to censor postcards for nudity, sexual references and copyright infringement — not an easy task given the wide array of sources from which people draw in their cards.

One of the cards he wanted to put in the book used an image from a Disney movie. Warren said he had to reject it after his agent at HarperCollins called him and told him, “The mouse will sue your a@#.”

The PostSecret Web site, which is free of advertising, does not generate revenue for itself. However, it does accept donations for 1-800-SUICIDE, a national suicide-prevention hotline.

Warren termed suicide “one of America’s secrets.” He noted that while suicides outnumber homicides in the U.S. by a factor of 2 to 1, they are rarely reported in the media.

Warren hopes that his site may help people to find better ways to deal with the things that haunt them.

“Each of us has a secret that would just break your heart if you knew what it was,” he said. The site gives its contributors a way to give voice to those painful secrets that might not ever come out otherwise.

“Maybe the people sending the postcards in are looking for some kind of grace,” Warren told the audience. “In this collection of anonymous secrets, we get a glimpse of how we’re all in this together.”

But while many people confess to secret love affairs, suicidal thoughts or petty thefts, one secret outranks all others in popularity, Warren concluded.

“I have seen ‘I pee in the shower’ rendered artistically in so many ways.”