SXSWORLD

Warren's Secret Fascination by Graydon Gordian M the southwest, but a postcard with something private written on it, something no one else knows. Warren is an incredibly personable man with a bright and ore than half a million people have sent Frank Warren a postcard—not your typical postcard, with perfunctory pleasantries written while on a trip to relaxed voice, like that of a fatherly high school teacher who is warm and friendly toward you even though you have never taken a class with him. He seems like someone you could confi de in. Yet, he does not even know the vast majority of people who send him postcards. Aside from presidential can- didates and maybe the bartenders on Sixth Street who work on Saturday nights, can any of us say that we have met half a million people? Why have half a million people sent Frank Warren postcards with secrets they have never divulged to another living soul? Simply because one day in 2004, he started asking them to. "I've always been fascinated with secrets," he said. "I felt like I was keeping secrets, and my family was keeping secrets. I felt I had this rich interior life that was private. And I thought others had this hidden world of inside jokes and sexual thoughts and hidden acts of kindness." PostSecret is the art project that sprung from Warren's fasci- nation with secrets and his call for postcards. It has become so popular that he sold his small business so he could work on it full time. He began humbly, wandering around Germantown, A Half Million People Share Frank Frank Warren during his SXSW 2008 Keynote presentation Maryland, where he lives with his wife and daughter, handing out postcards to strangers. Th e postcards had simple instructions: "You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative." After Warren set up a website to publish the postcards he received, PostSecret became far more than a community art project, growing into an international sensation. He has received postcards from across the United States and as far away as New Zealand and Iraq. In addition to publishing fi ve PostSecret books, he recently staged a reading of the fi rst PostSecret play and has seen the project exhibited at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Some of the juiciest postcards Warren receives are sexual: laconic tales about lust, adultery and suppressed fetishes. But PostSecret is as much about strength and generosity as it is about the sexual deviant in all of us. Frank often receives uplifting stories about unacknowl- edged acts of kindness, which have served as inspiration to start using PostSecret as a vehicle to help those in need. Th rough his wildly successful PostSecret Live events, at which he the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. Warren and the Washington, D.C.-based creative duo Bluebrain will be performing their PostSecret- based live show at SXSW. Th e show, which will be free and open to the public, combines some of the most moving, unsettling and inspiring postcards Warren receives with music by Bluebrain. If you have a secret to tell, this may be the time to do it, as at the end of every event, audi- ence members are invited to stand up and share their secrets. PostSecret has been a huge success, but that doesn't mean Warren is ready to move on to a new project. He still receives 100 to 200 postcards a day, enough to actually wear out his mailbox. It seems as though a lot of us still have a secret we need to get off our chest. "It still feels very fertile to me," he said. "I still love walking to the reads from postcards he has received and shares the stories that led people to send them, Warren has raised hundreds of thousands of dol- lars to help support HopeLine, a suicide prevention organization, and 32 SXSW ORLD / M ARCH F ILM- I A 2012 mailbox and pulling out the postcards. As long as I can protect the integrity of the project by keeping advertisements off the website, by using my home address," PostSecret.com will continue to publish the postcards Warren receives. In the spirit of project project, I'll let you all in on a secret I haven't told anyone: I just sent my fi rst postcard to 13345 Copper Ridge Road, Germantown, MD 20874. ■ "PostSecret + BLUEBRAIN: A Mulitimedia Presentation" happens tonight (Sun- day, March 11) at 6:30pm in Exhibit Hall 5 at the Austin Convention Center. KEN HITCHCOCK

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