He knows your secret. The secrets of your friends. Even what strangers are hiding. And some of them are in a new book that hit the shelves last Tuesday.

Frank Warren, also know as the “most trusted stranger in America,” was at UNLV last month sharing secrets with Las Vegas. The creator and self-described curator of the PostSecret phenomenon sat down with the Weekly prior to the event to talk about the community art project that invites people from around the globe to anonymously send their deepest confessions to him for the world to see. Warren sees the secrets as more than just a forum for people to get things off their chest. “Each one of us has a secret that would break your heart if you just knew what it was,” he says. “And if we could remember that and remind ourselves of that, maybe there’d be more understanding. More compassion. Maybe more peace in the world.”

With the newest PostSecret book there’s a definite theme. Many cards reflect the title of Confessions of Life, Death, and God, but others thrown in aren’t as obvious. What was your selection process for this book?

Like all the books, this one has secrets that are funny, or sexual, or hopeful, or heavy, or optimistic. Each postcard in this book has never been seen before and it’s been drawn from over a two-year period. And really, I’d say with this book more than any other, there are more spiritually related secrets—secrets about our relationship with death or an afterlife or how we handle those issues. Or even philosophical secrets about what people have learned through their lives. So in that sense, I feel like it’s almost the perfect closing book to the series.

Closing book?

Yeah, I don’t see another. I’m not really thinking about another book just with secrets for a while.

But you’ll continue the PostSecret Web site though, right?

Yeah, on the Web I try and share living secrets with people. Secrets that when you see them online you think “Oh, somebody’s carrying this in real time or dealing with that issue at the moment.” The books I think of more as archives knitting together a larger selection of individual secrets into this collective narrative that tells us something new about ourselves.

When you put this book together, you laid all the cards out a hotel room? Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Like most authors, I need a solid deadline to really get the book together in the final form. I was invited to HarperCollins to give them the book in its final form. I had most of the postcards, but it’s very important to me how I arrange them. So, the night before, I’d say for 12 to 15 hours, I was in my hotel room pairing the postcards and using all kinds of techniques: Literary techniques, film techniques, to kind of juxtapose secrets or connect on a theme or set up kind of a punch line, one postcard to another. Even though I think that each voice is very powerful speaking through every card, I think together, collectively, the conversation these secrets have, not just with us but almost with each other is the most moving thing of all.

Aesthetically, this is the one book of the five that’s not quite going to line up with the others on a bookshelf. What was the reason behind changing the format?

This book is a little more intimate. It allows most of the postcards to be shared actual size. We actually used a technique to make it appear as though each page has a postcard laying on it. There’s almost a shadow background to it. Also, this book is $5 less expensive than the last book that came out two years ago, and we know that’s important to people too.

You've previously mentioned you’d like to scan all the cards so they could be keyword searched. Is there any progress on that?

Oh yeah. I got this secret. It was a play on that Vegas advertising campaign. “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas?” Whatever it is. And the person wrote their secret and it was: “What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.”

I’m still keeping every postcard and we have them safe and secure in storage, but in terms of progressing, with that idea, no, not yet. But it’s still a possibility. I think there’s still a lot of life left in the project and that might be one of the future tasks.

Since we’re in Vegas, can you recall any secrets that stuck out as particularly Vegas-y, such as something about gambling, burying a dead hooker, or the like?

Oh yeah. I got this secret. It was a play on that Vegas advertising campaign. “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas?” Whatever it is. And the person wrote their secret and it was: “What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.”

Have you ever recognized the handwriting on a card and put two-and-two together with the postmark?

There’s one in the latest book from my mail carrier, Kathy. She outed herself on that card. My wife once tried to get a secret up on the Web. She wrote it on a postcard and I was able to identify it.

Do you find you worry about the strangers if you see certain cards? Does that weight on you at all?

Almost all the secrets arrive anonymously, so it’s difficult to reach out even if I wanted to. I try and channel those feelings that I have for helping people in promoting awareness of 1-800-SUICIDE, the national suicide prevention hotline on the Web site and also raising funds for the Hopeline. In five years our community has raised a half a million dollars for Hopeline and I’m very proud of that.

How do the cards affect you personally? Do you ever feel burdened? Enlightened?

I think all of the above. In some ways I feel like I’ve had to change to become the person who can see these very personal secrets everyday. But in other ways too I feel like a kid on Christmas morning every time I go to my mailbox and there’s all these great gifts waiting for me.

Do you ever get non-secret mail from the PostSecret community?

I have. One of my favorites arrived a few weeks ago. It was a little note and it said, “Dear Frank. Every Sunday I read the secrets with you in the morning and drink my coffee. Next week, the coffee’s on me.” And there was a $5 card for Starbucks in it.