Q&A with Sherilyn Connelly, author of Ponyville Confidential: the History and Culture of My Little Pony, 1981-2016.
by Patch O'Furr
Recently, I posted “The history of My Little Pony and thoughts about growing up with cartoons” to prepare for chat with Sherilyn Connelly. Sherilyn is a journalist local to the San Francisco Bay Area Furries. (She has given them notice in publications like SF Weekly.) Her first book is out this April: Ponyville Confidential, a pop culture history of the My Little Pony media empire. (Please like the book’s Facebook page!)
Hi Sherilyn, thanks for talking about Ponyville Confidential! Let me start by asking – who needs to read it? Will it be manely for fans? Will there be parts to tempt furry readers?
“Manely!” I see what you did there. Obviously everypony needs to read it, and it’s by no means intended just for My Little Pony fans; I hope that people who are interested in pop-culture history in general will give it a look as well. And there are many references to the Furry fandom, including shout-outs to Frolic, Further Confusion, and Anthrocon.
I know you as a committed, active fan who comes to Furry events and writes journalism about them (and movies, and more.) Can you give a brief intro about your background and writing?
I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was old enough to want to be anything at all. I started writing professionally for SF Weekly in 2011 — within a few months when I started grad school and began watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, so it was a momentous year in retrospect — and wrote quite a lot about the the local Furry scene at the time. I began contributing film reviews to the Village Voice in 2012, and became the Weekly‘s permanent film critic in January 2013.
I hear this is your first book, congrats – how excited are you? Would anything surprise you about how it might be received?
Don’t overlook more cool books! Dogpatch Press’s own star guest poster, Fred Patten, has 
“Our world is one rich with diversity and culture, but how would civilized animals change that?”
“Ghost Ship” was the name of the warehouse in the inner city of Oakland, California. I’ve often visited the neighborhood under the booming overhead trestle of the BART train. The warehouse was zoned for business, but harbored a live/work space that was built under the radar of building inspectors. It was funded by parties and rent from people living in RV’s parked there. It was home for a collective of artists and musicians from the cultural underground of the San Francisco Bay area. Many were pushed out of previous homes by pressure of rising rents. These most expensive costs in the country are making a crisis for culture.
(Patch O’Furr:) Furries love plush like a fat kid loves cake. My friends do, anyways. That’s how I met Amy Brown, a non-furry crafter who specializes in plush objects on Etsy. I heard that she enjoyed commissions for fursuit props. It makes me happy when furries make friends like that! Amy mentioned weirder commissions, and that made me invite her to tell some juicy stories. (Mmm… carrot juice for everybunny).