Sarah Siegel Life Editor

With more than 1,000 postcards flooding his mailbox every week, Frank Warren probably gets more mail than Santa Claus. Warren is neither a rock star nor a senator; he runs the meteorically popular Web site PostSecret, a community art project in which strangers send him secrets, which he posts each Sunday.

“I think it’s kind of like that old story—you can tell a stranger on a train things you can’t tell your mom or your best friend,” said Warren. From the fearful (“I’m afraid there are no surprises left.”) to the inspirational (“If you were waiting for a sign...This is it.”), the secrets focus on both the traumatic and the mundane. Asked whether it matters to him if they are true, Warren explained that “all the postcards are works of art,” and even “if they aren’t true for the person who sends them in, they might be true for the people that come to the Web site.”

Warren frequently posts readers’ e-mailed responses to the postcards, giving the site the feel of an anonymous dialogue. Some readers share the cards’ sentiments, others offer resources and counseling for those secrets that betray thoughts of suicide or other psychological distress. In 2006, the National Mental Health Association presented Warren with a special award for havin “moved the cause of mental health forward.”

Erica Burkland ’07, now working towards a Masters in social work at the University of Pennsylvania, may use PostSecret-style projects in her clinical group work. “It’s a good converging point for hundreds of thousands of people to realize that others share their feelings,” said Burkland.

Burkland has sent in three secrets of her own. “After sending the second secret I did talk about it with other people,” said Burkland, “but that first step of sending it off is important. It’s cathartic.”

Since beginning the project with a museum show in 2004, the Web site has received more than 100 million hits. With dozens of the obligatory Facebook fan clubs, a new community Web site where users can post video secrets, and hundreds of spin-off projects (which Warren encourages), PostSecret has also just released its fourth book, A Lifetime of Secrets. The new book focuses on the lifecycle of secrets—“the ways we change and the surprising ways we stay the same.”

To see the PostSecret project, go to postsecret.blogspot.com.