Beginning in 1951, Donoso Pareja frequented the Guayaquil home of Enrique Gil Gilbert where he engaged with other young poets and writers of the time.
A few weeks later, on 11 July 1963, the military junta of Ramón Castro Jijón took control of Ecuador, and Donoso Pareja went into hiding, and the newspapers reported that he "went underground".
In 1985 Donoso Pareja was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship grant of $26,000 to write fiction; he then traveled several months in Spain and other European countries and spent all the money, and so returned to Ecuador, locked himself up in a borrowed apartment, and wrote 22 stories of love, which expressed a deep sense of loneliness and despair.
[clarification needed], Donoso Pareja was elected president of the Guayas branch of the House of Ecuadorian Culture, and moved permanently to Guayaquil.
By Gutiérrez Moscoso, had Leonor, died as an adolescent, Maria del Carmen and Miguel Donoso Gutiérrez, who authored a collection of short stories titled Punta de Santa Clara, which received the Jose de la Cuadra Prize (1982) In 1979, Donoso Pareja married Corunnan born and Cuban raised Aralia López González, divorcing in 1983.