访谈录[Interview]2007-11-03:秘密集中营（在线收听）

Frank Warren was once just another man. Now he is the keeper of secrets. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world have used his website postsecret.com to release the unbearable weight of the secrets they carry. They send him anonymous secrets on postcards and he places them on the site for the world to see.

Postsecret is a project I started about 3 years ago. I passed out 3000 self-addressed postcards to strangers in Washington DC, inviting people to share a secret with me, something that was true and something they had never told anyone else before.

So you handed out these postcards. What were you expecting people to write back?

Well that was a part of the mystery. I had no idea what would happen when I started this project. And I got two surprises. One was people began to hand-make their own homemade postcards. The idea spread virally. And I started getting postcards from all across the country and now all around the world. In just 3 years, I’ve received over 165,000 artfully decorated postcards with secrets from around the world.

Why did you do this?

Well I think in my childhood I probably grew up in a household that has some secrets, some that I knew about and some that I never found out about, and so maybe the mystery of those secrets and the wondering about them in my childhood led me as an adult on this, this quest for secrets.

Is there a reason why people send postcards and not letters?

I think there is something special about postcards. All the way along its journey, it’s exposed, you are sharing that secret and the secret itself almost takes on a life of its own as it’s on this card and going through the postal service.

Absolutely, I am sure the postal service people love these things. Right?

Oh, my mail-carrier is named Kathy. I have a great relationship with her . I asked her one time, what her favorite, her favorite postcard was, her favorite secret she had seen, and of course you know the postal services are not supposed to read the postcards that're going through. But she told me her favorite one and she said it was one that said, I used to work at the post office and we used to read everybody’s postcards. Are you guys doing that?

Have you ever got the secrets you refused to post?

I don’t really consider myself a filter or a censor. If people mail me a secret, and it has that ring of authenticity to it, I'll post it. I'll post anything. Some of the secrets are very painful and very deep and dark. Others are hopeful and funny and sexual and poetic and I think that’s one of the beauties of the project, coz it really puts us back in touch with an uncensored part of who we are.

You think this is like a, a sort of a penance for people, a way to get some weight off their shoulders?

I have received some e-mail follow-ups from people and what they have said is that, facing their secret on a postcard and then physically letting it go to a stranger has brought them a sense of solace or relief or, or ownership over that experience or secret. So I think also it can be the first step in a person’s long journey in reconciling with the part of their past that they might have been hiding from.

Frank has also compiled the secrets into four books, his most recent book, A Lifetime of Secrets, was released just in time for Halloween.
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