The idea is simple: Anonymously reveal a secret on a homemade postcard.
PostSecret, the now-famous, ongoing community art project, is material for three books, featured in an All-American Rejects music video and displayed on a weekly updated Internet blog, postsecret.blogspot.com, that publicizes the anonymous disclosures.
In November 2004, PostSecret creator Frank Warren, who will speak at Ohio University Saturday, tested a novel idea for the Washington, D.C., community show Artomatic. Warren printed 3,000 self-addressed postcards inviting strangers to share their innermost secrets. He passed them out on D.C. streets and slipped them between the pages of public library books.
This yielded 100 postcards within a few weeks, and those were used for the show's original display.
One of the biggest surprises was the artwork created by the senders
Warren said. It demonstrates that there's an artist inside all of us.
As the project spread through word of mouth, Warren continued to receive postcards. Today he has over 100,000, and his Web site receives 1 million hits a week.
All of us have a secret that would break your heart if you just knew what it was Warren said. If we could just remind ourselves of that there'd be more compassion and understanding in the world.
The postcards reveal everything from romantic desires to admissions of criminal activity.
One of Warren's favorites was written on a Starbucks cup: I give decaf to customers who are rude to me.
PostSecret hits dorms
Jenna Hazelton, an administrative resident assistant for Voigt Hall, heard about Warren's work and tested it in her residence hall Winter Quarter.
Everyone has secrets
said Caitlin Snyder, a junior resident assistant in Voigt. It built a sense of community because people are able to see how similar they are.
It was so popular that Hazelton extended the original cut-off date and repeated the collection again this quarter in Voigt. After she mailed the most recent batch to PostSecret two weeks ago, tRAC opened up the project to students and put blank postcards in all on-campus mailboxes. Returned secrets will be displayed during Warren's visit.
I love my boyfriend
but I enjoy my single status on Facebook so much that I won't change it
a crayon-scribbled postcard declares.
Another displayed a beautiful photograph of blue, expansive sky and ocean cut into little strips and sewn together with navy blue thread. Scrawled on top of this paper mosaic is the secret: Yesterday I could have sewed the sky together to make you smile. Today I sewed it for me. I finally did something nice for myself.
The value of confession
Labeled at once exhibitionistic, voyeuristic and sensational, PostSecret also has been tagged as raw, honest and cathartic.
There are two kinds of secrets ' there are the secrets we keep from others and the secrets we hide from ourselves
Warren said.
Disclosing secrets to others
especially those secrets that you've held onto for a long time
is likely something we all want to do
said Kathi Heffner, an assistant professor in the OU psychology department.
Heffner said secrets often are linked to embarrassment, remorse or shame, but keeping secrets goes against human social nature.
As social beings
we really want to share emotionally charged secrets ' even if we do not know who is reading about them
