Standing in a grocery store aisle, Debra Gipson was listing the reasons she believed Hollywood would never give her work a chance. She was an older African American woman. She had gained weight. Who, she wondered, would even read her scripts? By then, she told me, she was close to giving up.
Then a bag of rice flew off the shelf and landed nearby.
She picked it up. The label read Papa Steve's Rice. In her private shorthand, Papa Steve is Steven Spielberg. "I laughed my head off," she said. "And I was like, 'Okay, God, I hear you. I'll continue to write.' And I never looked back."
A listener can take that story as comedy, as superstition, or as the kind of thing people tell themselves at a low point. Debra took it as an instruction, and followed it.
I met Debra in the first week of our VetTec 2.0 program in artificial intelligence and machine learning. She posted in the class Discord asking whether anyone wanted to be her technical co-founder. Near the end of the first course, our instructor told the class that her startup had been selected for a pitch competition. That’s when I asked her for an interview. This profile draws on two long conversations and a few written messages. Most of it is her own account, and where I could check something, I say so.
Debra is a screenwriter, a United States Army veteran of the Iraq war, and the founder of StoryNest Media. The easy version of her story is resilience: a hard childhood, a war, a long fight, a comeback. Her own telling points elsewhere. What she describes, again and again, is conversion. An injury became a screenplay. A loss became her first published essay. A rejection became a company.
The Work
The screenplays began with a movie theater. After a back injury in the service, Debra says, she was assigned to the Wounded Warrior Battalion at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, where she served as executive officer while she received treatment. For a short time the injury left her in a wheelchair and earned her a nickname, "The Wheelchair Soldier." To heal, she was told to walk, and she walked to a movie theater every day.
Before each film, the theater ran a short video of Americana. Nobody in it looked like her. She asked the manager to change it. She asked again the next day, and the day after. She wrote to the Department of Defense. Nothing changed.
"If I couldn't change the video," she said, "I would change what was seen afterwards."
She wrote Sons of Distant Fathers, then its prequel, The Balance of Wrath, then Swing, about a white-passing Black baseball player named George after her grandfather, who she says played in the Negro Leagues as a “ringer” under another name. She also wrote Broken Crayons, which she calls her love story, a comedy built around the idea that we are all broken in some way, but “broken crayons still color.” The scripts took about six years. She calls them the happiest years of her life.
Sons of Distant Fathers is, on its surface, about a Black soldier in the Korean War, a young man accused of a crime who joins the military and goes to fight. Debra built it as a disguise. "If I had come out and said, 'Hey, I wanna write a story about policing,' people would've been up in arms." So the policing went inside a war movie. "What's dangerous about the story isn't the story about how a kid survives the Korean War. What's dangerous about the story is what it says about policing in this country."
The design turns on who changes. Her protagonist, Joe Nathan, does not. The sheriff does. He keeps turning up unannounced, once outside the house of a woman called Miss Mildred, without introducing himself. In Debra's account that arbitrary presence is the point: it stands for the constant gaze of police on communities of color. She also objects to a habit she sees in Hollywood, handing Black stories to ensembles and rarely to a single hero. "If you focus on a single hero, you would have to admit that African Americans are heroic individually, and that challenges the American psyche in terms of what they believe about who gets to be the hero." Joe Nathan is her counterexample.
She writes in her head first, narrating characters out loud while she walks down the street, "which makes me look like a complete lunatic, but I do not care." The voice arrives before the plot. Miss Mildred came to her saying, "Boys, you come help me with these here groceries." She will rewrite a line "again and again and again and again" until she hears it the way the character needs to say it. I asked whether she would rather have a festival prize or the veteran who cries at the screening. She did not hesitate: "It is the veteran who cries."
The Loop
Debra draws her outlook as an infinity symbol. Something tragic happens, and if she waits, something profoundly good follows. "Whatever starts for me in hurt and pain ends up being the greatest blessing," she said.
The loop has an origin story, and it is a deathbed. Her grandfather George, according to family lore passed down by her grandmother, was dying when she arrived. He told his wife he wanted to know that he had shared the planet with the baby before he let go. He died about a week after she was born. "I believe that my grandfather loved me so much that he asked God to wait, and God agreed." When she accomplishes something, she thanks him. I made it worth you asking for that extra week.
Her faith is not the kind that keeps her still. "Faith is not about what you read in a book," she said. "Faith has to be tested because you leap and expect God to catch you." She contrasts herself with her brother, who follows the rules. Her own way, she said, looks to her family like "disarray" and "chaos."
Six Years Old
She dates her sense of herself to a bedroom floor. When she was about six, Debra says, her father stood over her mother with a pair of sewing shears and threatened to kill her. Debra ran from her bed and threw herself into his legs, again and again, until he stopped. He looked down at her and said: "You are crazy. You are one crazy little girl."
She remembers her prayer from that age in plain terms. "At least give me one," she asked, meaning one parent. She described the house as a place she had to learn to read. "I was a student of that dysfunction," she said, "and I had to figure out how to not let that dysfunction affect me." Her mother taught her to read at two, and by three, Debra says, she was working through whole books.
The Gun
At about twenty, Debra says, she was waiting outside her apartment building for a date, dressed for it. A man came up the walkway. She told him to leave. He answered with the language, she says, that women get when they say no, and then he took out a gun and put it to her forehead.
She did not move. "You gonna shoot or we just gonna stand here?" she asked him. Then she told him that if he pulled the trigger, her ghost would jump out of the closet and scare the daylights out of him. He lowered the gun. His friend laughed. She remembers thinking, in the moment, "If this is how it ends, this is how it ends. I am okay."
Months later, she says, the same man became her protector, firing warning shots to scatter men who were closing in on her on the street. To Debra this is the infinity symbol in its purest form.
Counting
Debra deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army from 2006 to 2008. She rose from specialist to sergeant, was later commissioned as an officer, and retired for medical reasons as a captain.
She was on guard when a vehicle came toward her position, driving erratically. She had the authority to fire. "I could have simply have shot and then called it in and said, 'Hey, I shot this person,' because they were driving erratically, and they would've likely have killed us," she said. "But I took the time to count and to be compassionate, which was what I prayed for when I stepped foot in country."
She talks about war the way a person of faith might, as a place where everything she was taught gets tested. "To be a soldier actually is to separate yourself from everything that you are taught," she said. Thou shalt not kill, and then the order to do it, and a decision made at the speed of training. The moment is the subject of her piece The Things We Pack, and it is the source she points to for the idea that organizes her writing and her life. "Everything I do is about strength and compassion," she said, "because I love that tension. I think it represents, at its core, it represents everything that it means for us to be human."
She does not treat the two as opposites. Strength, in her telling, is the refusal to move. She cited the boxer Claressa Shields, who said she would never again be afraid of a man: "When you make up your mind that you will stand and will not be moved, that is the most powerful thing in the world." Compassion is a decision made under pressure: count first. Her prayer carries both. "God, give me peace," she said, "but let me always have the capacity to be a lion if I need to roar."
Underestimated
In high school, Debra says, a instructor told her she was "nothing but a dumb, ignorant Black girl" who would end up in a trailer park with the government paying her bills. She responded by hiding how smart she was. It did not work. "It's really hard to hide intelligence," she said. "It always leaked out anyway."
At Oberlin, a professor made her answer a question about the future of the world economy. She predicted the disappearance of the middle class: only the very rich and the very poor. Afterward she told her, "You hide how smart you are. You don't do the readings. You barely come to class. But you know way more than you admit."
She has carried both halves of that since, a mind she conceals and an irritation when it is underestimated. "Before AI, I cannot tell you the number of times people said I plagiarized something I wrote, because nobody ever expected for a Black woman to be able to write in the way that I wrote."
She also described a long dispute over her home and her work that she says is ongoing. She does not describe herself as anti-authority. "I don't know that I challenge authority," she said. "I think I challenge right and wrong."
Journey Well
Her other motto is a gentler one. "Journey well." It is how she says goodbye. "And I mean it with everything inside me, and it burns people."
She has a theory for why it is possible. "I don't grieve the loss of people who leave my life. Not long term anyway. I grieve it and then move on from it," she said, "because I believe that people come to your life to teach you what you need to learn." Sometimes they cannot grow in her presence, she said, "like a plant."
She also lost a son. He died, she says, a couple of days before he turned fifteen months old. Years later she wrote about it, and that essay became her first published work. She stopped to apologize during the telling, and then went on. The healing that came from writing it, she said, was "tremendous."
I asked her how she looks after herself through all of it. She answered in a written message. She prays, journals, and writes, and she leans on a close group of friends she considers family. "That has meant the world to me these past few years," she wrote. "They have been tough on me. But, if anyone was built for these challenges it was M-E."
Out of her relationship with her mother she made a theory. In any relationship, she said, there is a question one person asks and the other must answer yes. The deepest is Do you love me? She spent years asking her mother to love her, which seemed to be an impossible request. "But what if I changed the question?" she said. She began asking whether her mother had gifts she could share. The answer, she said, was always yes.
The Company
StoryNest Media is where the screenwriter and the founder meet. Debra started it in 2025, she said, because she was tired of Hollywood closing her out. She described it to me in writing as "a media company that uses AI to help companies expand IP."
The structure is simple. She wrote the scripts over about six years. She owns the company, and she sold the scripts into it. "I sold them to StoryNest," she told me, which makes the company's main asset the work she had already made. "The value of those scripts is the value of StoryNest."
A company built this way rests on a handful of finished works and one person. Distribution, audience, and income all still have to be built around them. She did not walk me through how the AI service works, who the clients are, or what it earns, so I have left those out.
Her biggest constraint, she said, is the technology, and she misjudged it. She had assumed she could hire a chief technology officer to build the infrastructure behind the company. Then, partway through her technical training, she realized the technical background was not something to delegate. "I always needed the background in computers," she told me. She said she felt "both proud of myself and also a little disappointed that I didn't see it." Her rule for getting through it is a single sentence. "I put my head down and just do the work. I keep my focus on the work, no matter what the work is."
The Classroom
Debra is 59 and she is in a VetTec 2.0 program in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Before it, she said, "it was a miracle if I could cut on the computer." She uses an AI model as a tutor, typing in a subject and asking it to explain. She finds the exchanges encouraging, and described the model as telling her it was struck by the level of question she asks.
I asked her what she is trying to build. She did not say legacy. She said what she tells God: "Let me live as much life as I possibly can so that when it ends, I can return back to you having made the world a better place."
Near the end of the second interview she told me about a former commander, now one of her closest friends, who once interrupted a story she was telling. "Why do you tell stories as if the story is extraordinary and not as if you're extraordinary?" he asked. She said she said nothing for twenty minutes. She celebrates that day, October 10th, as a second birthday.
She is, at the moment, a beginner, and she said so with a kind of delight. "Now I have this much information," she told me. "I'm hoping to grow up it to this much information. And I'm excited about it."