In conversation with Ali Isaac and Catherine Redford
Online
Wednesday 22nd July 2026
Join us online for a special conversation with Ali Isaac and Catherine Redford.
We’re delighted to welcome Ali Isaac and Catherine Redford for an online event celebrating two remarkable debut books in conversation: Imperfect Bodies (Héloïse Press) and The Way the Water Held Me (The Emma Press).
Across memoir and poetry, Isaac and Redford write with rare honesty about care, motherhood, grief, disability, love, and the stories we tell about bodies under pressure. At the heart of both books is a shared exploration of care - not only as lived experience, but as something writing itself can enact: a mode of catharsis, recuperation, and the development of selfhood.
Together, these books offer profound reflections on how writing can help us live through loss, care, and change.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
In Imperfect Bodies, Ali Isaac reflects on becoming mother to her daughter Carys, born with a rare genetic condition after doctors predicted she would not survive pregnancy. Through luminous, incisive prose, Isaac interrogates motherhood, disability, medicine and the cultural politics of “normality,” offering a deeply intimate and radical reimagining of what it means to live - and love - in a body that defies expectation.
In The Way the Water Held Me, Catherine Redford charts the devastating loss of her wife to terminal illness while they were expecting their first child. In poems that are visceral, searching and alive with love, Redford writes through grief, care, memory and continuation, weaving personal experience with the spectral companionship of Mary Shelley in a debut collection of profound emotional and intellectual depth.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ali Isaac’s writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Sonder, Paper Lanterns and Catatonic Daughters. She was selected for the Penguin WriteNow programme in 2020, and is a recipient of the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award. Imperfect Bodies is her first book.
Catherine Redford began writing poetry after being widowed at 35. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including Magma, Under the Radar, Propel and Ink Sweat & Tears. She is an editor at Dust Poetry, a Writing West Midlands Room 204 writer, and a Nine Arches Press Dynamo Poet. The Way the Water Held Me is her debut collection.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Hosted online in partnership with Opt Indie Books, this conversation will explore writing through care and loss, motherhood and disability, poetic and memoir forms, and the possibilities of literature to witness and transform lived experience.
Online audience Q&A to follow.
Online event details: Hosted via Teams - a link will be send to all ticket holders nearer the event date.
Book and ticket bundles are available to order in advance and will be posted after the event.
We’re delighted to welcome Ali Isaac and Catherine Redford for an online event celebrating two remarkable debut books in conversation: Imperfect Bodies (Héloïse Press) and The Way the Water Held Me (The Emma Press).
Across memoir and poetry, Isaac and Redford write with rare honesty about care, motherhood, grief, disability, love, and the stories we tell about bodies under pressure. At the heart of both books is a shared exploration of care - not only as lived experience, but as something writing itself can enact: a mode of catharsis, recuperation, and the development of selfhood.
Together, these books offer profound reflections on how writing can help us live through loss, care, and change.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
In Imperfect Bodies, Ali Isaac reflects on becoming mother to her daughter Carys, born with a rare genetic condition after doctors predicted she would not survive pregnancy. Through luminous, incisive prose, Isaac interrogates motherhood, disability, medicine and the cultural politics of “normality,” offering a deeply intimate and radical reimagining of what it means to live - and love - in a body that defies expectation.
In The Way the Water Held Me, Catherine Redford charts the devastating loss of her wife to terminal illness while they were expecting their first child. In poems that are visceral, searching and alive with love, Redford writes through grief, care, memory and continuation, weaving personal experience with the spectral companionship of Mary Shelley in a debut collection of profound emotional and intellectual depth.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ali Isaac’s writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Sonder, Paper Lanterns and Catatonic Daughters. She was selected for the Penguin WriteNow programme in 2020, and is a recipient of the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award. Imperfect Bodies is her first book.
Catherine Redford began writing poetry after being widowed at 35. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including Magma, Under the Radar, Propel and Ink Sweat & Tears. She is an editor at Dust Poetry, a Writing West Midlands Room 204 writer, and a Nine Arches Press Dynamo Poet. The Way the Water Held Me is her debut collection.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Hosted online in partnership with Opt Indie Books, this conversation will explore writing through care and loss, motherhood and disability, poetic and memoir forms, and the possibilities of literature to witness and transform lived experience.
Online audience Q&A to follow.
Online event details: Hosted via Teams - a link will be send to all ticket holders nearer the event date.
Book and ticket bundles are available to order in advance and will be posted after the event.
