The blue walls of Prof. John Rubadeau’s office are covered with faces.

Overlaid on every spare space of the room, pirouetting from the ceilings like plastic pinwheels, they’re the smiling faces of students from long past and present-day — students in graduation hats, in party clothes, sitting, standing – all with stories to tell of their time as an undergraduate in Rubadeau’s class.

“I tease him — it reminds me of one of those crime dramas, except in a sweet way, of course,” said LSA senior Laura Hlebasko, who took Rubadeau’s highly popular class, Advanced Essay Writing, last semester.

Rubadeau, a tall, Santa Claus-bearded man in jeans and glasses, strides into his office and takes a seat. He pulls out a Tupperware container to reveal a lunch of celery and yogurt. Surrounded by all the glossy photographs of his past students, he looks as if he belongs.

Animatedly gesticulating to each of the hundreds of pictures on his walls, Rubadeau connects the stories written by the individuals behind the smiling visages — the worries and doubts of a breast reduction patient, a gay student’s first sexual experience in Prague, a boy’s complicated relationship with his brother, a student’s simple reflection about co-ed dorms at the University.

In Rubadeau’s class, each of these remarkable personal stories has been given a second life, indelibly crystallized on the page. Each story, when taken alone, forms an isolated tale, like the uniquely individual features on each face. When gathered together like this, dangling from the ceilings and plastered on the walls, the students and their stories make up something larger, communicating themes of love, lust and loss to the world beyond.

Such is the power of a personal essay. And this is the story of a class that makes it all happen.

I write, therefore I am

In an age when students take refuge in the fantasy lives of shiny vampires and Swedish girls with dragon tattoos, the self — or the ego, as Freud would say — can start to feel a little neglected. This is clearly manifested in the places that we frequent: In some libraries, the nonfiction section is relegated to the back of the dusty tomes, an amalgam of travelogues, biographies and memoirs thrown haphazardly together, while fiction gets neatly subdivided into its own genres of mystery, romance, horror, classics.

In the Hopwood Room, a small wood-paneled space in Angell Hall where literary awards totaling $120,000 are doled out every year, the lonely little stack of “Nonfiction” submissions is towered over by each of the “Fiction: Short Story” and “Poetry” piles. Since the Hopwood Awards’ inception in 1931, submissions to the “Nonfiction” category have consistently taken last place — their number reaching a mere average of 40 per semester. At times, the category receives so few submissions that the judges can fail to award a recipient for that year altogether, according to Hopwood Assistant Director Andrea Beauchamp.

Why do people shy away from formally revealing their interior lives to the public sphere? Though we live in a culture where the reality show is king and confessional Tweets and Facebook statuses get updated at the punch of a button, the popularity of the personal memoir has somehow fallen by the wayside for University students so used to informal methods of communication and soul-sharing.

But nonfiction possesses an element that fiction only provides a pale imitation of: authenticity. Rubadeau said that a personal essay gives the writing more authority.

“Oftentimes, reality is so much more interesting, so much more captivating, so much more edifying than fictional stories are,” he said.

But the fear of writing such a piece perhaps derives from a hesitance to look at an individual life through the lens of a bystander.

“The biggest problem people have is that they realize, ‘Oh my god, I’m writing about real people — they might read this,’ ” said Prof.