We had another first this past week when on Thursday, the 28th of September, we recorded an interview with Frank Warren of Germantown, Maryland, over the telephone, and the dynamic seemed to work fairly well. Judge for yourself from the podcast. Frank is the author of the 2005 book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, and, as the book jacket tells us, “is the founder and curator of the PostSecret project. A small business owner in Maryland, Warren started PostSecret in November 2004. To date, he has received more than 10,000 postcards.” When we talked to him, that number is up to 70K. His blog is at http://postsecret.blogspot.com.

Frank began by addressing the “rich interior lives” we might not always share with each other, the “social masks” we wear. Gloria contributed the anecdote about how, when asked, 25 children in a classroom consider themselves “artists” at 6, but only two of the same number consider themselves artists at 12. We then went on to talk about how courage may be more important than technique in the creation of art, the evolution of the PostSecret project, the project’s second birthday in November, that these are “more than just secrets now,” that this is “a community that has come to life,” the dialogues, the secret sharers, new kinds of conversations, how the more we play with it the more we find out how it can serve, a new book designed to be read by children, his 12-year old daughter Haley and dedicating the new book to her, the daily volume of 200 postcards to read, his mailcarrier’s take on the whole thing, “I used to work at the post office,” the fact that he’s “an accidental artist,” his other life as owner of Instant Information Systems, the issue of dignity versus site advertisements, his sixth exhibition which is now at the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, gearing up to go international, the Smithsonian, his 70,000 artifacts received to date, the snapshot format of “a day in the life” of PostSecrets, the origins of the project in an art exhibit, inviting 3,000 to share a secret with him, how the project took on a life of its own well after the exhibit closed, that strangers entrust the cards to him, the therapeutic effects of writing the cards, the purgative effect of annulment processes, tries not to impose his intention on the project, following the project where it leads, experimenting to see what resonates, the similarities of international secrets, all secrets being unique in their own way but very unifying as well, scanners versus cameras, the fact that the process can be draining, thinking of himself as a movie editor each Sunday, being pursued by secrets even in Boca Raton, so taboo and so in your face, the powerful experience of clicking through, taking people on an emotional journey, a certain authenticity, old white men and stockholder sentiment, “a real rawness,” the fact that you can’t sugarcoat secrets, having material lifted, AdBuster Magazine, “artifacts that people have left in my care,” their most guarded secret that makes them most vulnerable, the things that matter, the community forum aspect of all this, and the things that make us all human.

We’re hoping that Frank can have an art opening in one of Cleveland’s new galleries soon and do some book signings here, so that we get to talk to him around the MTB table, face to face, and introduce him personally to the rest of our artists/bloggers/community builders here in NE Ohio. I think we have a lot in common.

Part 1. Time: 9.34
Part 2. Time: 9.50
Part 3. Time: 14.51

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