Membership Fager first met Quakers in Selma, Alabama in late 1965 when students from the newly launched Friends World Institute came to help with voter registration. He joined the institute to serve his CO obligation and became acquainted with some Quakers who were involved in it. He worked as a junior instructor at that college in 1966–1967. In 1969 he joined the Friends Meeting at Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he was studying at
Harvard Divinity School. Since then he has been a member of a number of Friends Meetings. He is currently (2014) a member of State College Meeting which is dually-affiliated with
Baltimore Yearly Meeting and
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. As he now lives in Durham, NC, he looked around the Meetings in the area and now attends Spring Meeting near Eli Witney in Alamance County.
Publications and Professional Pilgrimage In high school during the late 1950s, Fager got in trouble for writing and circulating a clandestine collection of satiric articles poking fun at teachers and school administrators. He has been writing ever since. He began work as a journalist in college, and in 1967, published his first book,
White Reflections On Black Power, followed in 1969 by
Uncertain Resurrection: The Poor Peoples Washington Campaign. He later took up journalistic reporting, mainly for "alternative" papers in the Boston-Cambridge area, while still enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. By late 1970, he was free-lancing full-time. In the early 1970s he was commissioned by Charles Scribner's Sons to write a history of the Selma Voting Rights Movement. This became
Selma 1965, the March that Changed the South, first published in 1974 and republished in 1984 and 2005. It is available from Kimo Press. From Massachusetts Fager moved in 1975 to
San Francisco, where he became a full-time freelance feature reporter for the
San Francisco Bay Guardian. One subject of his reporting there was former Congressman
Pete McCloskey. By 1978, after Fager had moved to the Washington DC area, McCloskey hired him as a Congressional staffer for the U.S. House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. He stayed in this position until early 1981, when McCloskey began an unsuccessful run for the Senate. Despite his high regard for McCloskey, Fager was not drawn to stay on Capitol Hill, and was content to leave it shortly thereafter for the renewed uncertainties of the freelance writer's path. In 1985 Fager began work for the U.S. Postal Service in northern Virginia, first as a substitute Rural Mail Carrier, and then as a Mailhandler, until mid-1994. The pay and benefits of the jobs were good for him and his family (four children). During these years of blue collar manual labor, however, Fager continued to be productive as a writer. He drew on this experience for his second mystery novel,
Un-Friendly Persuasion, available from Kimo Press. In 1979 Fager founded his own Kimo Press, which publishes Quaker literature, most of which was written by Fager himself. Beginning in 1981, he also edited an independent, muckraking and gadfly Quaker newsletter called
A Friendly Letter, which continued until early 1993. He founded a journal entitled
Quaker Theology in 1999. This is still published once or twice a year covering current events and religious thought among Quakers. After leaving the Postal Service in 1994, Fager was hired to create an Issues Program at
Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. From there, in 1997, he moved to Bellefonte, PA, where he returned to freelance writing, and later taught courses in Business Writing at
Penn State University. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he agreed to take the position of Director of Quaker House, a Quaker peace project in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. He retired from Quaker House in November 2012. Fager continues his research and writing. In 2013–2014, he was the Cadbury Scholar in Quaker history at Pendle Hill; while there he researched and wrote two books on the "Progressive Friends" movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In his writing, Fager has pursued several abiding interests: reporting, especially about current social issues such as the Civil Rights Movement, recent wars, militarism, and torture; religion, with special focus on Quakerism, or the Society of Friends; and stories, particularly for younger readers. In July 2013, Fager was arrested in a peaceful protest that was part of the "
Moral Mondays" campaign in North Carolina.
Organizations From 1996 to 2002 Fager also held the position of Clerk in the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts. He also was Clerk for the 2001 Quaker Peace Roundtable, and organizer of "A conference on The Military-Industrial Complex at 50", in January 2011. Since early 2005 he has been part of the Quaker Initiative to End Torture (QUIT). ==Personal life==