Bio

Joyce Milne D’Auria, born and raised in Scotland, graduated from Glasgow Royal Infirmary as a nurse. After completing a Master’s degree in counseling from St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York she moved to Florida and conducted a private counseling practice in Clearwater.

She has acted and sung in theater groups and sung solo and in church choirs. She enjoys living on the Gulf of Mexico, boating with her husband, Paul, butterfly gardening and walking. She travels often to research her Scottish historical novels and visit her far-flung family in the USA, Canada, Scotland and Australia.

More About Joyce's Family

Born in Coatbridge, Scotland (near Glasgow) into a large extended family of aunts, uncle, cousins, two grannies and one story-telling grandpa Joyce loved to read and to tell stories from her imagination to her wee brothers.

The lives of the grandparents and the ancestors fascinated her and she began to write about her Grandma Fox, a nineteen year old English Salvation Army officer, who tried to bring her firebrand religion to Darkest Scotland in 1900. She may have saved some souls and certainly two of her daughters were “Salvationists” all their lives. Her husband, on the other hand, may have paid only lip service (pun intended) to her strict teetotal message. So that, within the family, there operated one of the greatest schisms in Scottish culture down through the generations. The play between these grandparents makes for some amusing anecdotes in “Tales My Grandfather Told Us,” a chapter in Lumpy Porridge and other Scottish Memories.

Both grandmothers buried four of their children in the Old Monkland Cemetery, victims of childhood diseases and, no doubt, polluted air and lack of sunshine in the “Iron Burgh,” as Coatbridge was called at the time. They were heroic women, unsung, modest and hardworking to the end.

The book about Grandma has been started several times and simply acts as a catalyst or conduit for other stories. My Blood is Royal, my newest historical novel, brings Highlanders into Coatbridge in 1840, (specifically the village of Whifflet) to suffer and survive with drama, dignity and Scottish pluck, and a bit of idealistic romantic good luck.

A sequel due out next yearl Billy Boy brings a working class lad of Scottish Protestant and Irish Catholic extraction face to face with bitter sectarian conflict in 1870, the other great schism at work under the surface of the culture.