BLACKSBURG -- Roland Lazenby wishes he were a landscape architect.

If he were, perhaps he would have created a garden to honor the victims of the April 16 shootings, like the one friends created in memory of slain Virginia Tech student Julia Pryde.

"Creating a garden is a very subtle, very powerful, very appropriate way to respond," he said. "I thought it was beautiful. ... But I'm a writer."

So Lazenby, a Tech professor, and seven of his journalism students wrote a book. "April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers" will be released Tuesday. It's a not-so-subtle effort that Lazenby hopes honors the victims and helps some in the community cope and gain perspective on how the shootings changed them.

"One of the things that pulled us along in this book was a sense of trying to understand ourselves," he said. "I think everybody who was involved on that campus that day is kind of checking themselves out."

The 324-page paperback book, the first to be published about the shootings, is written as an oral history. It uses short transitions to tie together accounts from dozens of members of the Tech community and news articles in its first two sections. The final section consists of student-written tributes to the 32 victims.

The first section, "April 16," includes gripping accounts from students and professors in Norris Hall that morning and details emergency and university response to the shootings later that day. The section also follows the story of how Lazenby and students in his 9:05 a.m. journalism class heard about the shootings and began reporting on the story immediately for Planet Blacksburg, a student-run Web site that Lazenby helped create.

While in the classroom in Shanks Hall that morning, one of the students was interviewed by CNN. It was quickly clear that the students were in an unusual situation of being reporters and subjects of the same story.

Lazenby and the students experienced a similar qualm writing a book about a tragedy that is still so fresh to the community. He said the book is one that "maybe ... some people will want to read down the road awhile." But when an agent and former editor of Lazenby's contacted him about writing the book, he said it was clear that if it was going to be published, it needed to be written immediately.

Lazenby, a former Roanoke Times reporter and author of several sports books, has taught at Tech for eight years and has spent most of his life in Southwest Virginia. The toll of the tragedy made it hard to concentrate on the project at times, he said.

Tech junior Suzanne Higgs, one of the seven student contributors, said she can't bring herself to read the book after living through the event and spending the month of May working on it.

"Transcribing was really hard, because you had to go through it all again," she said.

But the same emotions that made writing the book difficult also helped the group through a grueling month of work to meet the June 1 deadline of the publisher, Plume Books, a division of Penguin Group.

"This book was fired out of a cannon. We were just propelled, I mean at a tremendous velocity, by the emotion," he said.

Lazenby e-mailed scores of people in early May asking them to write about their experiences as if they were talking to friends. They could be interviewed if they preferred. Lazenby said he thought that was the least intrusive way to solicit material for the book.

Still, Lazenby and some of the students received some negative feedback from people who thought it was too soon to write a book and who accused them of being opportunistic. But other than scholarships for the students who worked on the book, profits that would normally go to the authors will instead go to support families of the victims, Lazenby said.

Each of the students had the authority to decide against publishing the book and could nix its publication confidentially by telling Lazenby.

The second section of the book delves into some of the impressions people had of the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, and recounts how the community came together after the tragedy. It's also critical of the behavior of some of the media covering the event and its aftermath. Writing the book has led to more national media attention for Lazenby and his students. While most of the stories have been positive, the attention did lead to some negative backlash.

"AOL did a piece on it, and some people got on there and said some really hard things about some of these kids," Lazenby said. "You know, if you don't like the book and you have hard things to say, address those to me."

But the group went ahead with the work, in the same Shanks Hall classroom where they first heard about the shootings, pulling all-nighters and finally finishing at 7 a.m. June 1. Tech senior Neal Turnage said that while it was sometimes a struggle and he endured some sleepless nights, emotionally, the result of the work was positive for him. He felt like he was doing something to help when he interviewed people.

"You'd see it in their faces and hear it in their voices and the relief they have when they get something off their chests," he said. "I want it to be as much a help for the community as it was for us who did it," he said.