The Ralphie Project …

  • is concerned with putting Louisville, Colorado on the map as being a center of higher education in the art of writing—and appreciating what the writer brings to a community; for the city to become not only the home of the Prince—but also for Ralphie’s ideas of forming a philosophical kingdom to be brought to fruition.

  • is an attempt to reimagine the town’s mission to its people by creating a magical kingdom based on becoming a publishing center for forgotten, overlooked, and dismissed writers—the idea is to break apart the existing paradigm of the publishing industry.

  • would be a 5-to-10-year project, requiring not only community collaboration, but also a ‘Round Table’ of like-minded citizens with political courage—but most of all possessing a lot of imagination.

Great ideas often have humble beginnings—and to think that a young, unassuming green dragon, from an enchanted forest in the lost lands of the Kingdom of the Verbose, could change the world would certainly take an awful lot of imagination.

But that’s where the people of Louisville come in!

Everyone in the community could partake in this endeavor—because some ideas are just too big for one little dragon to handle alone.

Here are just a few of the innumerable possibilities within our grasp—we are only limited by our imaginations:

  • Art classes in schools could have drawing competitions for illustrating the Prince Ralphie Series.

  • Plays and skits could be produced in like manner.

  • Annual festivals could be held, along with parades and fireworks.

  • Ralphie reading hours with the authors could take place at the library and bookstores.

  • Probative intellectual discussions could be held at these events, concerning Ralphie’s core philosophies—spawning even more writers with courageous imaginations.

  • Book clubs could be formed to share interpretations and reactions to the text.

  • The books could be used as teaching aids in expanding young readers’ imaginations, historical knowledge, and vocabularies.

  • The books could be made available to schools, hospitals, and other institutions that deal with children, as well as seniors.

  • An ‘Order of the Heart’ foundation could be formed—to purchase copies for those who can’t afford them, distributing them locally at schools and by neighborhood—and also to award locally active civic groups trying to change society through art.

  • There would also, of course, be merchandise that could be organically included into the Ralphie Project.

If Prince Ralphie were to be taken seriously, he could become a cultural icon, a cultural influence, leading to a celebration of the magic of words in writing prose and poetry.

All that is needed to turn Louisville from an old mining town into a world of magic, not just for green dragons but for everyone, is to dream it, and then speak it into existence—our words, our dreams, our hopes, our vision, is all that is necessary.

In this way we all can live out our heroic, mythical dreams on the realer-than-real stage of a beautiful old mining town—but this time reimagined as a reader’s redoubt, a publisher’s paradise, a playwright’s playground, a storyteller’s sanctum sanctorum.

It may seem a difficult decision to base the town’s future on a seemingly imaginal aspiration—but the statistics back up the claim. As these adventures will ultimately comprise a series of ten books in all, seven of which are already written, even with a break-even financial beginning, the Ralphie Project could still earn revenue for the city in the long run.

While there will be practical aspects to overcome in making the dreams of Prince Ralphie into the realized philosophical kingdom of his imagination, they are not insurmountable—the fact of the matter is that the arts are the biggest predictor of future earnings longevity for a town looking to broaden its revenue base.

Again …

we are only limited by our imaginations.