Slavko Ray – Author Interview

Slavko Ray

Slavko Ray, author of “When Cheers Are Not Enough.” Slavko Ray taught and coached secondary school students for twenty-eight years. A father of two, he is now retired and lives with his wife Christine in Erin, Ontario. When Cheers Are Not Enough is his debut novel.

Tell us about your background. Who are you, and where are you from?

My parents immigrated to Canada from a region in Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia in the 1950s. They settled in Hamilton, Ontario, which is where I was born, a kid brother to two older sisters. When I was seven, the family moved out of the city to Stoney Creek, into a neighbourhood that would be my home for the next twenty-odd years, bordered by farms of the Niagara fruit belt to the east, the Niagara Escarpment to the south, and the Lake Ontario shoreline to the north.

My educational pursuits resulted in a Classical Animation diploma and a bachelor’s degree in Physics—Ed, and in Education. Soon after embarking on a career as a high school teacher, I met a lovely and talented chemistry teacher named Christine (who taught down the hall), and she eventually agreed to be my partner for life. Thirty years of marriage later, we have raised two bright and beautiful kids (Lucy and Ben) and are now settled into retirement, keeping busy with Gibson, our cattle dog, on eight acres of property in Erin, Ontario.

Tell us about your book and what inspired you.

The thought of writing a book like “When Cheers Are Not Enough” was just a bit of fancy after I retired in 2017, and it wasn’t until I attended the Toronto Raptors championship parade two years later and witnessed first-hand the passion of the city for its team that I was inspired to tackle such a project.

The story depicts a year in the lives of four high school teachers, Baker, Conrad, Angus, and Masaccio, who occasionally meet to jam as a crude alt-rock garage band. They are also diehard fans of the Toronto Mighty Pines, a once-dynastic hockey franchise now mired in a fifty-seven-year Cup drought. Unwilling to stand idly by and watch another year of failure, the weekend rockers resolve to take their fandom to the next level by engaging in some amateur witchcraft.

They enlist the vocal talents of a new teacher, Perreault, and restyle themselves as a musical coven. By transforming song lyrics into hockey spells, they create a magical playlist of tunes that call on supernatural forces to help with their hockey woes. But the question of whether performing song spells has a greater impact than chanting “Go Pines, go” can only be answered by how the Mighty Pines fare during what will prove to be an erratic and unpredictable 2019-2020 season.

What themes does your book explore, and what do you hope the readers will take away from this interview?

“When Cheers Are Not Enough” takes a light-hearted approach to what is, at its core, an exploration of the Canadian hockey-fan phenomenon. The main characters are just such fans, faithful and loyal to their team.

They cherish every game along the journey to what they hope ends in a Cup, because they recognize that it’s the ordinary moments that can combine to make the overall experience more meaningful (unlike the contingent of fair-weather fans who dismiss the regular season and look beyond it to the playoffs).

My hope is for the reader to understand and relate to the characters as they stick it out through a long season, juggling hope and heartache along the way. In fact, there is a moment in the story where a reference is made to the Book of Ecclesiastes and how we are reminded to treasure the wonders of each passing day – or, in the case of the hockey fan, each passing game, regardless of whether the games are played in January or June. That lesson is summed up in three words: “Enjoy it now.”

What prompted you to be an author, and were you influenced by a particular person, artist, or genre?

I always had a healthy respect for the printed word. Reading was never a chore for me as a kid, so long as I maintained my subscription to “Sports Illustrated”, my weekly font of information and inspiration. When, in college, I was struck with an urge to sample the classics, I turned to Melville, Shelley, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert, to name a few.

At present, I find Umberto Eco to be an esoteric hoot, and anything by Annie Proulx is simply awesome. But my true inspiration – at the risk of sounding prosaic – would be “sports” in general. In my formative years, not a season went by without me playing and competing in some sport.

And I never discriminated; hockey, basketball, football, swimming, wrestling… they all were equally worthy of my time. Unfortunately, while I can admit to having been a pretty good athlete, true stardom eluded me. I was the proverbial Jack of all trades and master of none, which probably explains why I devoted so many hours in my adult years to coaching.

It brings to mind that brilliant line: “Those who can’t do, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach gym.” Funny enough, the line describes me perfectly. To wit, I spent 28 years as a high school teacher, and for many of those years, you guessed it, I taught Physics. Ed.

If you could compare your book to any other existing works, which ones would they be, and why?

Because of the role otherworldly spirits play in my story, an obvious comparison is to W. P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe”. However, in making that comparison, one would need to reimagine Kinsella’s classic not as an ode to America and baseball, but as an ode to Canada and our cherished pastime of hockey. Otherwise, I would like to think of my book as something that stands alone in its depiction of sports fandom by combining ice hockey with alt-rock music, coven magic, spectral entities, and even a bit of romance.

How can your readers contact you? Or buy your books?

I can be contacted via e-mail at slavkoray@gmail.com, or people can check out my Instagram site @slavkoraywrites.
“When Cheers Are Not Enough” is available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book formats through the FriesenPress Bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Indigo.

Alternatively, if you prefer a signed copy, e-mail me directly, and I will arrange delivery.
Thanks so much for this, Paul. It was a blast.