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Keeping Secrets

From: Aaron Henkin
Length: 00:17:15

A story about what happens when we hold on to secrets, and what can happen when we let them go... Read the full description.

Default-piece-image-2 I put this story together after meeting a guy named Frank Warren. He?s an interactive artist who created a project called Post Secret. About a year ago, he started slipping little homemade postcards into library books. The cards had his home address pre-printed on them, along with an invitation for the finder to anonymously mail a secret that he or she had never told anyone before. The response was huge. Over the past year, Warren has received over twelve thousand secrets in his mailbox. If you?re interested in broadcasting this story, here?s an intro that might work for your announcer / host: ?On any given day, we all try our best to be compassionate, benevolent, and charitable --- but we?re also human, and that means that we can?t help but harbor certain thoughts that we try very hard to keep from the people around us, and even from our own selves. Today, Baltimore radio producer Aaron Henkin brings us a story about secrets --- what happens when we hold on to them, and what can happen when we?re given a chance to let them go??

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Piece Description

I put this story together after meeting a guy named Frank Warren. He?s an interactive artist who created a project called Post Secret. About a year ago, he started slipping little homemade postcards into library books. The cards had his home address pre-printed on them, along with an invitation for the finder to anonymously mail a secret that he or she had never told anyone before. The response was huge. Over the past year, Warren has received over twelve thousand secrets in his mailbox. If you?re interested in broadcasting this story, here?s an intro that might work for your announcer / host: ?On any given day, we all try our best to be compassionate, benevolent, and charitable --- but we?re also human, and that means that we can?t help but harbor certain thoughts that we try very hard to keep from the people around us, and even from our own selves. Today, Baltimore radio producer Aaron Henkin brings us a story about secrets --- what happens when we hold on to them, and what can happen when we?re given a chance to let them go??

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Review of Keeping Secrets

A piece about one of the more mysterious sides of random communicaton - including the internet, which, honestly, is normally absolutely everything BUT mysterious. Aaron Henkin reports on this interesting project involving postcards and secrets and folks like you and me - at the center of it is this rather compassionate character for whom the project seems to have become nearly a way of life. I was thinking that this piece is a bit long, at 17 minutes, but yet there seems to be more and more to say. Then I was thinking about sending a postcard myself. Thinking about it leads to that, somehow. WHY?

Broadcast History

This piece is slated to air on 12.16.05 on WYPR's arts program The Signal

Musical Works

This piece contains excerpts from a song called "Glue of the World," by the band Fourtet.

Related Website

http://www.postsecret.com