We spent the day on the campus of Union University, home of the 2013 Southeast Journalism Conference. This is a two-day conference for undergraduates, and we’re fortunate enough to have four students here for instructional and inspirational presentations and various competitions.

The morning started with a presentation from Union’s Gene Fant, an English professor and dean, tell student-journalists about the 2008 tornado that devastated their campus. Fifty-one students were hospitalized, nine seriously hurt, but they all lived, even as firefighters told the students and staff to stop digging.

This is all appropriate for the conference because events like that can mark a place for years, even if the generations rotate out every fix or six autumns. But the theme of our conference is “The Power of Narrative: Journalism in the Digital Era” and Fant seques into lines like this one “Truth is among the most powerful elements … We cannot speak truth to power unless we speak truth in the first place.”

And then he winds up by saying “Treat truth as if truth were a person … Defend truth. Encourage truth … It always is a worthwhile pursuit.”

Fant was a nice start, but the start of the day, a day full of wonderful speakers, might have been the man that came after him. The Oregonian’s Steve Duin, a nationally renowned columnist, walked to the lectern after a video about the Un|Divided Project taking place at a failing Portland, Ore. school.

Duin starts out with “You never know when you will stumble upon the words that will change or reframe everything.” He tells us about the Roosevelt High girls basketball team. He’d read about a game where Roosevelt was beaten something like 70-10. One girl on the Roosevelt team had scored eight of their 10 points. This, he thought, would make a great story.

So he finally went to visit, to try to talk to the player, but found a school in a spiral, young women forgotten and their community in disarray. This was a story.

So he wrote about that. And those turned into the words that changed everything:

That, sports fans, is as inspirational a night as I’ve known for a long, long time.

Before a capacity crowd — 1,600 strong — the Roosevelt girls played their best basketball game of the season before losing 31-29 to Madison.

No one who was there, I suspect, will ever doubt again what an outpouring of love and support means for high-school kids. For one night, every move these girls made — every rebound, every shot, every hustling steal at mid-court — was celebrated.

For one night, the playing field was leveled, and the Roosevelt girls — yes, and the Madison girls, too — were cheered on by enthusiastic, caring adults who had no agenda, no unkind words, no investment in the final score.

Is it any surprise that Roosevelt — now 0-18 — played their hearts out? When I asked Monique Carlson, Roosevelt’s lone senior, to explain why they played so well on that dramatic stage, she said, “The support. Everyone was watching us. This is the most support we’ve ever had.”

But the sports story was only the beginning of a real story. Members of the community banded together, conspiring to take back the children in this school, which is where the Un|Divided Project comes in. Now they are making meals for the kids every week. And Duin’s details are the thing. Not just that these people feed hungry students, but that they did it under a ceiling held up by duct tape.

And then, sometimes the quote is the thing, like the student that comes up to the woman organizing this spaghetti dinner and says that this meal, this one simple dinner, is what he thinks about all week.

Duin quotes the woman who brought all of the volunteers together, by the hundreds, to try to turn this school around. He reads what he wrote in his column and you could see most everyone in a room of 400 college students sit up a bit straighter, “(W)e are called to love the world and the older I get, the more love looks like work.”

Photographer and videographer Larry McCormack of The Tennessean also delivered a lecture to the students, and he got right down to it, telling the students that if they think of themselves as just a reporter or photographer or copyeditor “You’re not going to last long.” So he launches into how his job has changed, saying his iPhone allows him to shoot a bit of video. “That buys me time” for traditional, high-quality photos.

He shows off some of his photographs and we all remind ourselves he’s been doing this for a good long while.

“Your perspectives,” he said, “aren’t obstacles. They are opportunities.”

Right about then our sports editor, Clayton Hurdle, grabbed this shot of Crimson editor Katie Willis teaching me all about photography.

We had lunch at Panera, and we discovered the Panera in Jackson, Tenn. is the best Panera in the world. Also, we were all hungry.

After that Clayton went off to his sports writing competition, Katie departed for a photography contest and then two other students, Megan and Catherine, set out for public relations and news writing contests.

I talked with faculty members about personal descriptives. I quoted Ferrol Sams and felt pretty good about it. If you don’t know why, add some of Sams’ work to your reading list. And you’re welcome.

David Simpson talked with the students about on-campus narrative in the afternoon session. He boils it down to four points: First, characters are (2.) moving through time while (3.) encountering an obstacle and (4.) acting until resolution.

I’d add textures and smells, which is something I learned in the best feature class I ever took. I’ll have to tell you about that tomorrow. But today Simpson gave the students an assignment and they all joined up with students from two other schools with one school’s characters, another’s issues and the third school’s obstacles. So the three groups I watched wrote a narrative of a ninja nun on an anti-STD and pornography crusade beginning at move-in day. It was entertaining.

Anthony Siracusa of Memphis was the last speaker of the afternoon, talking about the growing bicycling culture in his town.

Made me want to go ride my bike.

Siracusa said “No venue is too small if you want to advance your idea.”

He had a cycling column in the Commercial-Appeal for a time, while he worked on bikes in the tiniest of basement shops. He said that column had a lot to do with the change the cycling community has created in Memphis.

“Every time you advance your idea,” he said, “you make connections in people’s brains and sometimes their hearts.”

And then, “Once the truth gets the shoes on, you better watch out.”

I enjoyed it, but I like bikes.

At the Best of the South banquet this evening they fed us in a buffet line and handed out awards based on more than 400 students from more than 30 schools.

Samford won four awards, including best magazine:

The students picked on me for taking the safe photograph there, something Larry McCormack cautioned against. So, good, they were paying attention.

We celebrated with milkshakes.