Lisa Hering Bio

Lisa Hering currently lives in a small rural town in eastern North Carolina called Hamilton, along the slow moving Roanoke River, in an old Victorian home with a large wrap around porch and wide columns that allow the warm summer breezes to flow across the rattan rocking chair where she can usually be found writing and sipping English Breakfast Tea. She was born in Houston, Texas, and as a young child, traveled with her family in the mid 1960’s on long and  lonesome roads to see the formidable canyons of the American Southwest. Overwhelmed by the beauty and serentiy of the Grand Canyon, even at the delicate age of six, she believed that this land would impact the rest of her life and that somehow, it would make her life complete. But that would take a long time, and in the mean time, she would see the lands of her own ancestors with a father already deep in the trenches of genealogy.

Lisa graduated with honors from Stratford Sr High School in Houston in 1977. Her father’s ancestors came from Germany, and she transferred there for a year of European studies. She was baptized in an abbey built in the year 900 in a small town called Oberkaufungen in southern Germany, home of her German ancestors. The parsonage there still bears the name of one of her many times great grandfather who was the town’s official wise old man, or possibly mayor, the translation being vague. The church’s liturgical musicians welcomed this prodical daughter by playing Home on the Range at the beginning of the baptismal service.

Returning to Texas, Lisa attended Stephen F. Austin State University, her mother’s alma matter, in east Texas and lived in the same dormitory room as her mother had occupied thirty years prior. She embarked on a degree in Geology, in an effort to fulfill her childhood dream of somehow linking her future to the Grand Canyon. Graduating cum laude in 1982, a recession hindered her efforts to secure a job in the west, and she returned to Houston to work at Exon Production Research.

In 1993, she opened a bed and breakfast on nearby Galveston Island, calling it the Coppersmith Inn in honor of its former occupants. She also acted as the Director of Historic Properties for the Galveston Historical Foundation for a short time before selling the inn in 1999 and finally making her way out west. The inn which she started is now the longest continuously operating bed and breakfast in Galveston.

With her arrival in the west, Lisa’s dream appeared to be fulfilled. She moved to a small town called Sedona just two hours south of the Grand Canyon, and spent her first year doing nothing but hiking the trails of northern Arizona with a camera, a paint brush, and a pen. She wrote, painted, and photographed the place she loved and immortalized those times in a book called “To Sedona” published in 2009. 

However, life was not simply to be lived happily ever after. Sedona was an expensive place to live, and Lisa opened many entrepreneurial roads in order to remain. And she did well. At one time, she owned seven rental homes, two retail stores, and an alpaca ranch. In addition, she completely renovated a one hundred year old cottage. But the recession of 2008 began a long road that would alter her course significantly. With the downturn in the ecomony, her future was uncertain, and her savings were being slowly drained away. By 2016, she was forced to leave everything behind and search out a new and even more uncertain future.

This next move would lead her east, almost to the Atlantic coast. Here, her mother’s paternal ancestors arrived in the 1600’s, at least one from the Mayflower itself. With her, Lisa brought her parents, elderly now, her mother leaving this world only three years later, in the same county as one of her American Revolutionary patriots who hailed from Martinsborough, now called Greenville.

Since 2017, Lisa has spent her time restoring her 1887 Victorian home, and has added her artistic touch to it, complete with tromp l’oeil rugs and mosaic shower walls. She continues her art which takes many forms and has just completed a one-man show at the Martin County Arts Council where she displayed twelve different types of her art work.

Lisa still resides with her 98 year old genealogist father who has the self imposed title of “Genealogy Nut”, who still enjoys conundrums and still beats her at crossword puzzles. She has inherited his love for the greatest puzzle one can have, the history of their ancestors. It was because of his lifetime research that she connected with living descendants of her German and English ancesotrs, found a path not only to the Mayflower of Plymouth, but to signers of the origianl Magna Carta in 1215 at Runnymede, England.

Through times of trouble, the Grand Canyon has always been at her side. It appears in most of the forty short stories she has written since her time in North Carolina. She’s recorded them to audio with music and keeps them live on her self designed webstie for anyone’s pleasure free of cost. 

What’s next? Lisa plans to publish her stories this year in an anthology, and then hopes to explore some of the wonders of the east, the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail. There is room in her heart to keep the west and gain the east.