Christine Jordan for Spectator

Frank Warren is the keeper of America’s deepest, darkest secrets—secrets which he shares with six million people per month.

Warren, founder of the PostSecret project, stopped by the Cowin Center Auditorium at the Teachers College on Tuesday night to promote the Tuesday release of new book, “Confessions on Life, Death, and God,” the fifth in the New York Times bestselling PostSecret series, and to discuss the culture in which a project like PostSecret is born.

PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project, in which people with skeletons of all varieties in their closets are invited to send artful postcards to Warren’s home address bearing their souls. Those selected make it on to the blog, where anyone with Internet access and a bit of curiosity can scroll through this electronic Rolodex of private and anonymous thoughts.

At the talk and signing, Warren opened up about the projects meager beginnings: with a 3,000 blank postcards, Warren took to approaching strangers on the streets of Washington, D.C. “I would say: ‘Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets,” he said, adding after a short pause, “Yeah, it was as weird as it sounds.”

Weird or not, people made a connection with Warren’s goal to “share our secrets like gifts” to strangers, and even once he ran out of postcards, the secrets kept pouring into his Germantown, Maryland mailbox. And they didn’t arrive just on postcards—Warren has seen secrets mailed to him written on seashells, naked Polaroid photos, wedding bands, bananas, and one pound bags of coffee.

Warren waxed poetic about the nature of secrets for most of the talk’s first hour, saying that he loves PostSecret because it “invites you to think about the secrets in our own lives.” He said that he thinks readers find solace knowing they aren’t “alone with their secret,” and that their load is “a little less burdensome, a little lighter” after getting it off their chest. Warren himself contributed two secrets to the new book, displayed on page 103.

But Warren didn’t let the often somber mood of the night distract him from addressing some of PostSecret’s biggest issues like censorship and PostSecret’s anti-suicide efforts. After a brief tirade against the censorship of Wal-Mart and the pressure it places on publishers and artists like “Rolling Stone and Green Day,” Warren revealed some of the secrets he couldn’t include in his new book. One prominently featured a woman’s breast, another, a copyrighted image in the background.

Rarely does he censor the secrets he receives to be put on the blog, but he often feels that it is necessary, like those that describe rape fantasies or one in particular, which read “My brother doesn’t realize that his father isn’t our father” atop a family photo. “Those secrets don’t belong to us,” he said.

According to Warren, many reporters ask about the secrets he receives related to crime and murder, but few ask about self help issues like eating disorders and suicide, which get a lot of attention on the Web site every week and little from popular media. “Suicide is America’s secret,” Warren said, adding that he hopes to attack the stigma of suicide through PostSecret and begin a dialogue about how to fix it.

PostSecret also has a partnership with the National Suicide Hotline, and its readers helped raise $30,000 in one week to keep it running when it faced bankruptcy in 2007.

After a night of alternating between listening  to Warren in silent awe and laughing at his deft jokes, which poked fun at everything from his PostSecret-related ideals to tough topics like suicide, audience members were then invited to share their secrets at microphones placed in dark aisles.

Some expressed their gratitude to Warren for his vision, others shared the enlightened words of family and community members who similarly inspire them. They were fairly common secrets, but there’s something to be said for having the courage to stand up in a crowded auditorium and give them life.

And, common though they may be, none expressed what Warren said was the secret most commonly sent to PostSecret: “I pee in the shower.” That was probably quite the relief to the Columbians in the audience whose dorms have communal restrooms.