Share your secret with PostSecret founder tonight

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TELL FRANK WARREN a secret. Anything.

The artist and founder of the PostSecret project collects secrets anonymously and shares them in books and online.

Warren will share the stories behind some of the most outrageous secrets during a lecture at Old Dominion University tonight. At the end of the lecture, he turns the talk over to the audience.

"Students are free to get up and share their confessions, their sexual secrets, their soulful secrets, their hopeful secrets," he says.

That's his favorite part.

"I think everybody who comes feels a little bit more connected to their classmates and maybe less alone."

Warren, 44, held on to a secret for more than 30 years.

"In some ways, maybe that secret, at a level beneath my own awareness, was the reason I started this project." He says he will share that secret at the end of tonight's lecture.

Warren launched the Post-Secret project in 2004 with blank postcards. "Tell Frank a secret," the cards said.

"I kind of started it as a prank or sociological experiment."

In a month, he received 150 postcards filled with secrets. He turned those cards into a weekend art exhibit in Washington, D.C.

"After the exhibit closed, I kept receiving postcards, and I wanted to keep sharing them. The project took on this life of it s own."

Since then, Warren says he has received about a quarter million secrets, roughly 1,000 a week. He's shared them in four New York Times best-selling books, two traveling exhibits and at www.postsecret.com, a site that gets about a million hits a week. The blog took the No. 5 slot on Yahoo's list of most visited blogs in 2006.

"I always felt that people had these rich, creative interior lives - these internal monologues and senses of humor that they didn't always get a chance to share with other people," Warren says. He launched PostSecret to "create a safe, nonjudgmental place where people could share these parts of themselves."

Warren never knows what he'll find in his mailbox. Recently he got a cell phone. The secret was in a text message. He even received a Starbucks cup with a secret on it. The secret: "I serve decaf to customers who are rude to me."

Every secret isn't amusing. "One postcard I received had a picture of the World Trade Center, and it said, 'Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead.' That's pretty haunting."

Warren uses the project to raise awareness and money for the National Suicide Hotline.

"I lost a friend to suicide and a family member to suicide, and I've been through some dark days myself." He volunteers with the organization and says he has helped raise about $500,000.

Warren, not surprisingly, discourages people from holding on to secrets.

"When we're keeping secrets, those secrets can be keeping us, and I think they can prevent us from achieving goals."

He aims to help people reach their full potential with the project.

"Just releasing it to a stranger, I think, can change the role that secret plays in your life."

Sharing secrets with friends and loved ones is even better, he says.

"If we can be brave enough to share those hidden feelings and fears and hopes with people we trust, I think it gives us the opportunity to grow those bonds of intimacy that make life worth living."

DeAnne M. Bradley, (757) 222-3897

deanne.bradley@link757.com