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Joyce Derenas wrote User Guides and created Help systems for technology companies around Boston for fifteen years, retired, and then decided to have some fun. She loves the details of daily life in earlier times. She writes in her debut novel, the long shot, about Nazaire Poulin, a poor grain grower in the village of Saint Joseph of Beauce, Quebec. All of Joyce’s stories are based on the real lives of her Quebecois relatives, some pioneers to the Beauce Valley.
Decades earlier, Joyce started building her family’s genealogical tree and her love of the past grew from that interest. She has visited the village of her mother’s birth often, and has also researched in the rich collection of the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa, but in the back of her heart, she had always harbored a dream to go find some string, some footprint of her French-Canadian relatives in the deep north of Canada’s wilderness-Dawson.
Once retired, a love for primary research led Joyce to the Yukon for a two-month visit, searching for the ‘footsteps’ of her grandfather and his gold mining brothers. She says, “I left for the Yukon knowing that I had a connection to four brothers and two wives, and returned with knowledge of twenty-two deceased relatives and six living relatives.”
She received her BA in English with a Concentration in Writing from Worcester State College. While there, Joyce wrote her first, short biography of Ichabod Washburn, a steel magnate and one of the founding fathers of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. This short biography remains in the permanent collection of the prestigious American Antiquarian Society.
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