PI Lawyer Quits Practice to Write Full Time

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Posted Jan 28, 2008, 11:44 am CDT
By Molly McDonough

Just before turning 50, Gonzalo Barr left his lucrative personal injury practice in Miami to write full time.

It's a decision, at two months out, he doesn't regret. ''It's scary to quit your job, but at the risk of sounding pompous I think I did it at the perfect time,'' Barr tells the Miami Herald. "I have absolutely no second thoughts.''

Without an agent or publisher for the novel he's writing, his creative writing instructor Leejay Kline characterizes Barr's decision as "pretty ballsy."

The Herald notes, however, that Barr has already had some writing success, starting with a short-story collection The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa (Houghton Mifflin, $12 in paper), which won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in 2005.

It was the warm welcome from the literary world that Barr says encouraged him to pursue writing full time. His new novel expands upon one of his short stories from The Last Flight.

''I remember realizing that the one thing I really wanted to do more than anything else in the world was to write,'' he is quoted saying. "But I wasn't really sure how to go about it or how I could even support myself.''

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