Meet Reporter and Host Kelly Kenoyer!
Q: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A: Starting from a baseline of being healthy, safe, and financially secure, perfect happiness is usually found in a room full of people who delight me. Whether that’s spending time playing pinochle at my grandmother’s kitchen table in Ketchikan, or dancing lindy hop at 3am with a crowd of strangers and friends in Asheville. Perfect happiness for me is always about connecting with other people.
Q: What is your greatest extravagance?
A: Spending every spare dime on dance travel. I teach private dance lessons and do some cater-waiter work, then use that money to go and learn even more about lindy hop and dance with my friends across the southeast and along the eastern seaboard.
So far in 2025 I’ve traveled to Asheville, Durham, Charleston, and Knoxville for swing dance events, and will soon head to D.C. for DCLX, April 25-27. This is becoming both more and less expensive over time: as I make more friends around the region, I get free places to stay in dance scenes I visit! But I also find more and more events I want to attend.
Q: Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
A: “I hardly know her,” used after any word ending in “er” or “or,” for comedic effect. I’ve completely driven this joke into the ground, but for me, its overuse is part of the added comedy. I have to stop myself from saying it in more serious settings because its become an automatic response to torture my friends. (Torture? I hardly know her!)
Q: Which talent would you most like to have?
A: I’d like to be a better dancer, but that’s what practice is for, and I’m becoming a better dancer with each passing month. If I could snap my fingers and develop a talent with no effort, I suppose I’d like to pick up an instrument - likely the banjo. I like its versatility in genres ranging from folk to jazz to country, and that it can both be a melodic or a rhythmic instrument.
Q: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
A: I’d like to be less hard on myself, and recognize when I set unreasonably high expectations for myself.
Q: Where would you most like to live?
A: Someday I’ll move home to Oregon, the American equivalent of Tolkein’s Shire. I’m nostalgic for mountains and pine trees, hipsters and hippies, and for cliffs that abruptly interrupt the ocean. It’s a place of soft rain, fog layered between foothills, and that beautiful, particular phenomenon of a sunbeam striking a dewy branch, creating a stream of fog that dissipates into the air of the mountains. The Pacific Northwest is the most beautiful place on the planet, to my heart. And it’s where my family and many of my dearest, oldest friends still live.
Q: What is your most marked characteristic?
A: I’ve been told I have a unique ability to draw people together. I am proud of my ability to bring people into community together and make them feel at home.
Q: What do you most value in your friends?
A: I have eclectic taste in people, but all my friends are funny. I value their loyalty, their kindness, and the ability to have a great and engaging conversation.
Q: Who are your favorite writers?
A: I love Ursula K. LeGuin for her humanistic and philosophical fiction that uses sci-fi and fantasy tropes to explore the human psyche.
Octavia Butler has a particularly driving writing style that makes it hard to tear your eyes from the page. Her speculative fiction is shockingly on point.
Terry Pratchett’s love of the English language is infectious - he plays with the reader in a way I’ve rarely seen matched.
His characters are also some of the most memorable and delightful in all of fiction, even if all of Discworld is a parody.
I also have devoured a lot of Cosmere novels written by Brandon Sanderson lately. They are absolutely book candy, but I love the intricate world design and magic systems. If you can’t tell, I love sci-fi and fantasy.
Unfortunately, one of my favorite authors from my youth has recently been revealed to be a sexual predator. I’m disappointed that I won’t ever be able to read his books again without thinking about the disturbing behaviors of the author.
Instead, I’d like to recommend a newer author whose memoir I found compelling and devastating: Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House.
As for what I’m reading right now: Walkable City, by Jeff Speck. Here’s my annual effort to read a nonfiction book, luckily on a topic I am deeply interested in and report on often.
Q: Who is your hero of fiction?
A: Granny Weatherwax and Sam Vimes from the Discworld novels are both driven by a burning rage within themselves, fueled by a hunger for justice in the face of an unjust world. Their carefully contained anger becomes a powerful weapon when wielded correctly: an iron will that pushes them beyond normal human bounds. Both of them fear who they would become if they lose control. I admire them, and the writing of their interior lives is relatable to me.
Q: Who are your heroes in real life?
A: Lindy hoppers Anthony Chen & Irina Amzashvili are my absolute heroes. They are so elegant and make this dance look effortless. I’ve rewatched this performance from Lindy Focus 2024 about a dozen times – and it was even better when I saw it in person! Here’s a bonus video: Anthony proposed to Irina in the middle of a performance at Lindy Focus in 2021 – she said yes.
I can’t blame them for wanting to get engaged at Lindy Focus – that’s where I’ve spent New Year’s Eve for the past several years I’ve lived in Wilmington, and I’d like to spend every New Year there for the rest of my life. There’s just something magical about being in a space with hundreds of people all sharing joy in the same passion. You listen to the terrific music of Jonathan Stout, enjoy some of the best swing DJs in the country, and dance till your legs barely work. Last year I went with 12 friends from my Cape Fear Swing Dance Society, and we all were crying together at midnight about how much we love our little dance community, and the greater regional and global dance community.
I should also give a shout out to Jon Tigert, the organizer behind Lindy Focus who created this place that I love with my whole heart. He feels the same way about community organizing that I do, and I admire his effortless teaching style and how he welcomes dancers of all skill levels.
Q: How would you like to die?
A: I’d like to die in my old age, but from something dramatic and immediately deadly that is sure to make headlines. I’d also like my body to be returned to the natural cycle, so turned into fertilizer or perhaps left to be eaten by scavengers. It might play out like this: I’ve been told at the age of 95 that I have terminal cancer. I decide to skydive with no parachute into a remote wilderness, where the carrion birds can consume my remains. I high five all my friends at I board the plane, and do a backflip out of the plane into the sky to face my death.