At Home with Heather Stimmler-Hall

It’s a long trip from Minnesota to Paris, but Heather Stimmler-Hall has made the transition look easy. For the past fourteen years, she’s made her living as a travel writer based in the city of lights, supplying the expatriate community and visitors with practical information previously limited to savvy Parisians.

Heather was born in Philadelphia and raised in Arizona, but feels there is “no one area [she] can call home.” She first arrived in Paris her junior year abroad from Carleton College in Minnesota. With a background in journalism, her goal was to become a White House correspondent after school, but decided to return to Paris to visit friends before moving to Washington, D.C. “After three months, they made me get my own apartment.”

When it comes to online writing, Heather is something of a pioneer. She’s been writing about Paris since 1999 – a year after Google launched – in an internet devoid of Facebook and Twitter. She began writing weekly travel articles in the column, “Secrets of Paris,” for suite101.com.

Two years later, she launched a newsletter as part of a Yahoo group to help keep friends in Paris and France up to date with tips and events around the city. After some early success, she archived the newsletters and found a more permanent home at her current site, www.secretsofparis.com.

As the Secrets of Paris website expanded, she created two others, www.sleep-eat-paris.com for hotel and restaurant reviews, and www.naughtyparisguide.com which caters to women visitors. All three sites are “service-oriented.”

You won’t find any inner thoughts among the pages – other than a few pictures of her miniature pinschers, Pedro and Lena - it’s a “musings-free zone.” Instead, she tries to write about “things that make your life easier that you might not have known about.” With subscribers from over thirty countries, her readers clearly appreciate it.

Some recent posts include a calendar of events in the city, including a Coen Brother Film Festival going on at Le Champ Cinema or a pair of metro musicians playing at the Bastille Metro station. They’re things you might miss unless you’re fluent in French and have the latest Pariscope memorized.

That insider’s knowledge of Paris led Heather to write her first guidebook to the city, Naughty Paris: A Lady’s Guide to the Sexy City, which won the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Award for best travel guidebook. She describes it as if “Elle magazine did a travel guide” for Paris. With its list of hotels, lingerie boutiques, and sex shops, she admits research got a little interesting sometimes.

She also offers tours of Paris, passing on the more frequented arrondissements to show tourists a more alternative side of the city. Tours might include a morning in the stalls of the Marché d’Aligre or a promenade in Belleville or Montorgeuil.

She herself has lived in the thirteenth arrondisement since 2005, a place she’s lived longer than anywhere else. It’s a typically Parisian apartment in a typically Parisian area, just a short walk from the city’s Chinatown without a tourist in sight.

Her cozy place finally seems like home. In fact, she expects her application for dual French-American citizenship to come through this year. When asked what she loves most about Paris, she takes a second and replies, “Parisians take writers more seriously.” “People are more important” in Paris, she says.

Besides continuing her freelance work, Heather plans to continue working on her websites in the coming year. Her Fleur de Lire publishing company also looks to put out a Naughty New York travel guide this year, along with a new edition of the Paris book.

What’s her favorite secret of Paris? Free French classes at your local town hall. Not that she needs them. By now, she’s fluent.

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by Trafton Kenney
Photo by Arturo Oliva Pedroza
Gloobbi Lifestyle

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