Psst, wanna hear a secret? Here's where.

Everyone has secrets. Secretly Y’all hopes you’ll share them.

Secretly Y’all, recognized by organizers and participants as the only regular, official storytelling collective in Charlottesville, will soon hit its first year of providing a venue for residents to tell, divulge, perform, even bare their inner selves in front of a group of people who, for the most part, are strangers.

“Anyone who has an experience and talks can tell a story,” said Browning Porter, an Albemarle County resident and a Secretly Y’all regular.

The themes for stories are often personal: to name a few, “Tricked or Cheated,” “At War,” “Overworked and Underpaid: Tales from the Workplace” and most recently, “No Place Like Home.” Storytellers stand on a minimalist wooden stage in front of a stool and microphone at Random Row Books — a used-books store on West Main Street that has been Secretly Y’all’s home — with but a faint glow emanating from a stage light.

Some sit, some stand, some gesture wildly with their hands, but they all speak.

Storytelling as a performance art has gained popularity recently, University of Virginia Drama faculty member Doug Grissom says, and the trend is growing. For the audience, its attractions may be obvious — for the basic reason that it is entertaining to hear other people’s tales, jokes, secrets and gossip.

But what keeps the tellers themselves coming back? The up-to-10-minute stories change monthly based on the chosen subject line, but one thing remains a guideline — the tales should be true.

“I think it gives people a different way to connect and know each other,” Leslie Channel, one of Secretly Y’all’s founders, said in an interview. “And it doesn’t require a lot of preparation, necessarily.”

Channel said the collective, dreamed up by herself and roommates Lauren Russo and Rachel Vogus, came about after a brainstorming session more than a year ago about what event the three could start in the city.

Many of those involved say humans are natural storytellers, and participating in such a collective indulges their need to tell their anecdotes. Secretly Y’all launched last November.

“I think there’s a natural human instinct to want to bare our souls to people, even strangers, and have them sympathize and maybe even applaud,” Porter said. “That’s just a natural human impulse, I think.”

September’s theme was “No Place Like Home,” and the six scheduled storytellers during Act I of the night talked of their former homes becoming sets for zombie films, moving back to Charlottesville, and having to break into an apartment that hadn’t been home for one night but still felt like home nonetheless.

“When I heard the theme, it was sort of like the day after I had just gone back there to check out this zombie situation. So it was kind of perfect,” Porter said of his former Prince William County home. “I was kind of like, how could I not?”

Whatever it is, Secretly Y’all appears to have passed the storytelling spirit to Richmond, where that city’s first event was held last month.

Denise Stewart, who received her master’s from UVa’s Drama program, has gushed about Secretly Y’all’s three founders and the monthly Charlottesville storytelling staple they have created. Stewart has told one story at the event.

“They are very typically, wonderfully UVa. I mean that in the sense that they’re organized, and thorough, but they’re very creative and they create a really laid-back atmosphere,” Stewart said. “You have the sense that this is a show … but there’s also, from them, and them radiating out through the storytellers, an appreciation of the craft of the story. But it takes something to pull that all together.”

Channel says the next event is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 17 at Random Row Books. More information can be found at secretlyall.wordpress.com.