I first met Savannah Huitema in Ann Arbor, Michigan when both of our ex-boyfriends worked for the same real estate company. Since that time, Savannah has gone to and graduated from Harvard Law School, moved to New York, and started her career at a prestigious litigation firm, all while continuing to work as a model, all over the world. Not only that, but she is also a gifted writer, and was recently brought on as the Style Critic for The Metropolitan Review. For this conversation, Savannah spoke to me from her home in Manhattan, via Google Docs.

You’ve had such an interesting career path, going from modeling to Harvard Law School, to working as an attorney at a top litigation firm. Did you always know you wanted to be a lawyer? Was that the plan even when you were primarily modeling? 

Art…fashion, literature, movies…is the organizing principle of my life. Life wouldn’t be worth much to me without art. Working in fashion showed me that way of being, and now as an attorney, I work with designers, actors, musicians, visual artists, dealers, galleries. 

I’m still living in that creative world, but I’m doing it in a way where I get to spend my time thinking through difficult legal problems and advocating for the people I represent. And it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.

What kind of law do you specialize in? Do you feel like that’s informed by your work in the fashion world? 

Most of my practice is in the art and entertainment world. I’m a litigator, which means I fight a lot. Although I’m a lover at heart, you have to be ready to go to war for your clients when it matters. I’m a fixer. When I have a client, it’s like, talk to me. We’re going to figure this out. Together. 

There’s a Jorge Luis Borges quote that says “I am not sure that I exist, actually, I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” That’s how I see my legal practice. A life in fashion got me ready to practice law. I have strong instincts, I know how to tell a good story, and I know people, because I’ve seen the world and I’ve been fortunate enough to know and love brilliant people.

What was your experience like at Harvard? Was it colored in any way by your work as a model?

Harvard is its own animal. At its best, it’s a place where you get to go learn from incredibly gifted, smart human beings. I got to be a teaching assistant to the great philosopher, Michael Sandel, for example, and that changed my life. I didn’t know any other models there, so that was weird. I’m sure that colored it, but we all have a past.

How long have you been writing for? How did you get started in the writing world? 

I started writing short stories in my pink butterfly journal as a little girl. My mom bought my first journal for me. I mostly ripped off The Chronicles of Narnia, but it was a place to start. Great artists steal, as they say, right? I wrote for The Harvard Independent, and I continued writing fiction, some published anonymously. Now, I think a lot about culture, about fashion and visual art, and that’s what I get to do at The Metropolitan Review with the brilliant editors Lou Bahet and Ross Barkan. 

In addition to a demanding day job in law, you still model too. How do you find time to write? How does it fit in with the rest of your life? 

Writing makes me a better lawyer. Writing is a practice, like my Vipassana practice. How you write is how you think, and vice versa. I don’t believe in not having enough time. Yes, time poverty is a thing, but if you care about something, especially if it's something you breathe, you make the time. So I model, I write, and that work, that creativity, feeds itself into the practice of law. It’s all inseparable.

What writers have been influential for you? Who do you like to read? Is there anyone in the writing world you’d want to meet? 

I live in the world of the greats as much as I can. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s gorgeous prose in The Beautiful and the Damned rocked my shit. When I was a kid, I read Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I immediately identified with the main character, Francie Nolan — you see Truth in yourself, and you realize we’re all having this complex, beautiful, and sometimes very dark human experience. Nothing is original. We’re all in this together. 

There are so many writers I adore right now. I’m obsessed with the critic Naomi Fry at The New Yorker, and I’d love to meet her. She followed me back on Instagram and I flipped out. If John Maynard Keynes was alive, I’d love to meet him. He was a writer, a great economist, a bisexual king, and he loved great art. 

You were recently hired as the Style Critic for The Metropolitan Review. Do you have a vision for how you want to report on style for that publication? 

I think Styles gets overlooked as just being about clothes, or just being about trivialities. But actually, Style is the whole point. If you understand what kind of art a culture makes, what kind of people it values, how aesthetics present, you understand the deeper reality of that society. What better way to make sense of reality, to make it coherent? That’s what I want to bring to The Metropolitan Review, and that’s what I want my corpus of work there to reflect. I want to show people that you can’t fully understand contemporary life without  Style. 

Do you plan on writing a book? Are you working on one right now? You definitely should! I could see you writing a really interesting memoir. 

I have a long-standing habit of falling in love with artists. Men and women who show me how to see reality in new ways. I’m a hopeless romantic. I am working on a book, and I think it will end up reading like one long love letter to all of those artists who I’ve spent time with, who have shown me new ways of exploring. I’m very attracted to bold people, bold ideas. 

What’s next for you? 

I want to be a fucking amazing attorney. I want to be a fucking amazing writer. And also I want to be a kind person while I’m at it. I’m open to wherever that leads. The Japanese call it ‘Kai Zen’ — continual improvement. I love that. We’re the poets of our lives, and I think to live as an artist means to attend to even the smallest and most commonplace matters with deep attention.