August 12th, 2022, Salmon Rushty, one of the world's best known writers was attacked and nearly

killed by a young man with a knife.

Now Rushty has written of that harrowing day and all that's followed in a new book when he recently spoke to our Jeffrey Brown for our arts and culture series canvas.

As we sit here a year, a little more than a year and a half after the attack, how are you?

I'm, you know, surprisingly good.

Surprising to myself, certainly, but also actually surprising to quite a lot of the army of doctors

that I've been involved with, many of whom have said that the recovery is much in excess of what they would have expected.

The knife attack, 15 stabs, came at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York.

During a public talk on, of all things, the importance of keeping

writers safe.

It left Salma Rushine near death.

He would lose use of his right eye and suffer numerous other injuries to his hand, neck, chest, and abdomen, and undergo

multiple surgeries, numerous setbacks, a painful slow recovery.

When he decided to write about it, he says now the first word that came the title

knife. At its most basic, it's the story of a knife attack. But then I came to think of it in another way, a kind of more metaphorical way. I came to think

like language is a kind of knife, you know, it's a kind of, also a sort of tool which you could use to

cut through things to the truth.

And I thought, well, that's my knife.

I don't, I don't, and if you're

going to be in a knife fight, you may as well have a knife.

So in a funny way, I came to think that the book itself is a knife,

but it's my knife, it's my way of fighting back.

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