Recently, Keshet sat down for an interview with Shira Glassman, a queer Jewish fantasy writer whose many books and stories constitute the imaginative —and very Jewish, very queer — world of the Mangoverse.

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Tell me about what has inspired the fantasy world you’ve created in your writing and specifically,  Queen Shulamit,  your Jewish, queer heroine?

I’ve lived in North Central Florida pretty much my whole life. I had wished that there was some kind of sapphic fairy tale content because when you’re when you grow up in Florida, you grow up near Disney World and all the Disney magic. But I felt very left out of the magic. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which lesbian princess plot to write and none of them were really working. I used to think of my brain as this waiting room of lesbian princesses. Shulamit, the heroine of the Mangoverse who is also Jewish, got to be the one that escaped the waiting room. 

I grew up with a lot of doom and gloom both in queer and Jewish narratives. That intersection led me to have this desperate need to have some kind of a story that was not rooted in all of that tragedy. I just wanted to escape to a place where a happy ending was on the table. And I’ve never been looking for unrealistic happy endings. I’m looking for what I like to call messy happy endings because that feels more realistic. A happy ending, but it’s not perfect. 

Passover is coming up! Tell me about your fun holiday scenes!

There are two significant Passover moments in the Mangoverse. The first takes place in Climbing the Date Palm which is a gay fairy tale about labor rights. In the story, the king doesn’t pay his workers. So there’s a revolt and of course, the guy leading the revolt and the youngest prince are romantically involved and everything has worked itself out by the end thanks to lesbians and dragons. There’s a seder at the end — everybody’s together having a good time and all the people that love each other are in one room.

There’s also a standalone short story called Aviva and the Aliens in theTales from Perach collection. Aviva is the queen’s partner who is bisexual, working class, and a chef. The queen has a bunch of food allergies and intolerances and Aviva is the one who figures out the allergies.  Aviva has her own kitchen house which is gluten-free and poultry free so that Shulamit can always eat there and knows it’s safe. And in this story, Aviva has just done b’dikat chametz with the feather and the spoon, the ritual of clearing out her house of anything that might constitute chametz. But then someone gives her a bag of flour to make matzah with and now she has to start over. While she’s contemplating how to do that, the whole kitchen house gets kidnapped by aliens. The aliens got tired of everything on their ship tasting the same. So they wanted to kidnap a chef. Aviva wonders how she’s going to get out of it, and it hits her. I’ll make matza and then they won’t want me to be their chef. So it’s basically a 4,000 word matzah joke, but it’s affectionately meant. The point is that matzah is not the best food on earth :).

Who do you write for?

In the beginning, I was just writing for myself because I wanted these things to exist. My writing is a very self-indulgent playground for me. It’s a place of safety. My books are heavy on found family because found family is a theme that’s really important to me. This is just my playground where Jews and tropical fruit, and love between women, and guys who wear black and are smirky and smug, and Yiddish, and all these things can just be celebrated. 

I’m also writing for anyone who just wants fantasy to be gentle to them and to enjoy themselves. I write for Jews who are looking for fiction that will make them feel warm and fuzzy about Jewishness and people who want to celebrate fantasy and art and agriculture and found family. 

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You can purchase Shira’s books on Amazon, Gumroad, and Payhip. 

Shira is a bisexual Jewish violinist passionately inspired by German and French opera and Agatha Christie novels. She lives in north central Florida, where the alligators are mostly harmless because they’re too lazy to be bothered.