TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what Eric Metaxas is going to do next is like sticking a pushpin into a cyclone.

His current writing projects for children include three new books (one of them, The Boy and the Whale: A Christmas Fairytale, published by Third Story Books, is out now for the Christmas Season), a nascent radio show under his own Golden Fish production company, scripts for the Rabbit Ears radio series — “I write jokes for Mel Gibson,” he says wryly — and poetry. For adults, he has immersed himself in a sea of screenplays, sitcom scripts, humor writing, short fiction, ideas for novels and Christian apologetics.

And none of this mentions the genre for which the New Canaan author has been best known over the past several years: his writing for the video/ audiotape/ book world of the esteemed Rabbit Ears Productions of Rowayton. Any weary parent who has popped in a cassette of Squanto and the First Thanksgiving or Mose the Fireman or Stormalong or The Monkey People knows Metaxas, even without knowing the name. He has worked on more than 20 videos and books.

Rabbit Ears video programs, which have been accorded, at last tally, two Grammy’s (and 13 nominations ), 20 Parents’ Choice awards and seven Action for Children’s Television awards, are the “Masterpiece Theater” of kidvid — except more fun. They combine famous-actor narration, careful illustration, famous-artist music, and, of course, intelligent, meticulous tellings of classic tales. Even in such ether, Metaxas’ scripts glow. (If you started a tape intending to go about your business for a half-hour and found yourself slowing, then stopping, then sitting, then entranced — well, it was probably written by Metaxas.)

But the connection between Metaxas and Rabbit Ears, while not severed — he still does work for them, although he has departed as editorial director and head writer — is no longer a lifeline.

For one thing, the 31-year-old Yale graduate is writing for adults now, too. Yes, the father of Mose the Fireman wrote a script on speculation for Seinfeld — which didn’t quite make it, but he believes comedy writing will loom large in this future. (“It was as if they said, ‘This is the most exquisite dress in the world! But I don’t wear blue!’” says Metaxas of the sitcom-writing process.) The writer of The Monkey People seriously considers writing about Christian faith. The perpetrator of Stormalong has written a beginning of a quasi-magical novel set in Greece. But it’s a long, strange trip that ahs brought Metaxas to this point. In fact, a wild ride, literally.

It is perhaps not surprising — but then again, almost too neat, given his literary leanings — that Metaxas’ parents should have come from Greece and Germany, home of myth and home of fairy tale. (They met in an English class in Manhattan in 1957. Eric, the older of two boys, was born in New York in 1963.)

Greece, which he has visited four times, has the greater hold on him. He can trace his family back 540 years on Kefallinia, a large island off western Greece. Metaxas keeps a 1901 photograph of the harbor above the mantel of his cozy New Canaan cottage, where he rooms with a childhood friend. The dark eyes and olive skin, the shock of barely controlled black hair and high-bridged Greek-statue nose all give him the air of an Odyssean sailor in a tasteful tie.

His just-barely-controlled conversational reserve — he chooses his words with great care, but there are lots and lots of them — turns antic as he tells, for example, a true-life take of glimpsing the putative skull of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife.

A less-likely spot also holds a mythic claim on his sensibilities: Danbury, his boyhood home and “a place I love.” As boys, he and his friends spent days exploring the countryside, discovering small ponds and lakes teeming with fish. “We always threw them back. We were young sportsmen,” he says.

When Metaxas was a senior at Yale, infused with the teaching of John Hersey and reeling from a recent bout of Cheever, he wrote a short story, “The Wild Ride of Miss Impala George.” The love of fishing and Danbury, and his emerging love of myth and folklore, converged in the half-historical, half-magical folktale of a village flooded to make way for a hydroelectric plant. With the backing of Annie Dillard at Wesleyan, the story, which is both haunting and luminous, won numerous awards and was printed in Blair & Ketchum’s Country Journal.

So by the time Metaxas was 22, he was holed up at the distinguished writing colonies of Yaddo and McDowell, although their peculiar discipline was not for him. (“I was climbing the walls,” he says now. “‘Is it 3 o’clock yet? Can I go play racquetball?’”) He tried New York, then Boston for 21/2 years, writing and writing, selling a few short humor pieces to The Atlantic Monthly and amassing glowing rejection letters. “I floundered horribly,” he confesses. “Those were painful, soul-searching years.”

By 1987, he was back in Danbury, living with his parents and working as a proofreader at Union Carbide. “You can’t even imagine the stuff they made me read!” he says. “Manuals with columns of numbers!” And, he says now, he was nearly suicidal. “It was evil, dark, horrible, terrible.”

Then, in the summer of 1988, the world turned upside down. Like a missle from a catapult, the writer says, Christ entered his life. He immediately turned his future and career over to God — and was promptly, unexpectedly, laid off from Union Carbide. Seven hours later, Rabbit Ears founder and CEO Mark Sottnick called, and within two days, Metaxas had a major writing gig with the company, “one I was thrilled to be working on and proud to have done.” Thus began the “extraordinarily happy” Rabbit Ears period, during which the mandate was, he says, to “take literary works and make beautiful, booklike videos.”

The ability “to be able to write for another person to read [aloud]” is a Metaxas hallmark, says Sottnick.

Metaxas spent years perfecting the art of the 3,000-word video script, a Procrustean bed whose peculiar pain he still feels. Narrators, for example, varied wildly. Robin Williams, he claims, could read 4,000 words in the time it took William Hurt to read 1,000. The script, however, stayed the same length.

Yet in other ways, the latitude was great. For The Fool and the Flying Ship, for example, Metaxas essentially rewrote the “incredibly dull” Russian folktale. In Princess Scargo and the Birthday Pumpkin, too, he adapted an American Indian story liberally. In a rare burst of hubris, Metaxas tried writing one script — Mose the Fireman, a New York folktale — with a narrator in mind. He hoped, and wrote, for the ba-da-bing cadence of Joe Pesci. He got Michael Keaton. Keaton did a fine job of reading, he concedes, but to his ears, it’s still Pesci.

In literary terms, the Rabbit Ears output was great, the work rewarding. Spiritually, something else was going on. Something new and strange.

“My whole world view was completely turned inside out,” he remembers. “The first few years of being a Christian I felt like a baby. I had to re-learn how to walk again. I was given new legs I didn’t understand. At Rabbit EarsÖ I was able to do something without having worked out my world view. I knew there was truth but I didn’t know anything about this truth.”

At present, Metaxas — not surprisingly, given his attention span — belongs to not one but two churches, both in Manhattan, both central to his life, but utterly different. One, Times Square Church, is Pentecostal and vigorous in its ministry to addicts and prostitutes. The other, Redeemer Presbyterian, is upper-East-Side intellectual. “Like comparing Billy Sunday to C.S. Lewis,” he says.

In recent months, the spiritual coming to terms has brought Metaxas to a literary rapprochement as well. Lately, he has found himself revisiting forms such as the short, Robert Benchley-like humor piece — “a weird, quirky little genre” — that he hasn’t touched in years, occasionally even picking up pieces he started years ago at Union Carbide.

He likens himself to a reluctant Jonah, protesting God’s call to Ninevah. “I was shanghaied and thrown on a Rabbit Ears steamer bound for places unknown,” he says, “But I found myself in the place I was going to all along.”

But he intends never to abandon children’s literature, a subject on which he is passionate, linking it back to his love of folklore and tales both adults and children could find meaning in. “The best stuff, the stuff that has lasted, the stuff that’s great, is not kiddies’ stuff,” he says. “It’s not Clifford the Big Red Dog.Ö If it’s appropriate, and told in the right way, you can say amazingly sophisticated things to kids.”

One of the hallmarks of a Metaxas work — at least the ones that aren’t what he calls “joke joke joke joke joke” — is the evoking of difficult truths and deep emotions in few words. In King Midas and the Golden Touch, he uses a classic tale of greed to explore longing and parental love. He turns Squanto into a take of grief and loss and nobility. In this passage, Squanto has just met the Pilgrims:

“They told Squanto of their trip aboard the Mayflower and of their harrowing first winter in which so many had died. Some of them had come to know the fathomless sorrow of watching their entire families perish. Then Squanto told Bradford his tale of woe. “We are brothers in sorrow,’ he told William Bradford, ‘you and I.’”

Metaxas was unexpectedly heartened to discover that writers he has long admired, who have the ability to create a unique mythic world appealing to children — Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, Madeleine L’Engle — have also had strong Christian faith.

But what about the kids’ stuff, the grownup stuff, the fiction, the verse, the radio work, the Christian writing for children and adults? There is time for all this?

Metaxas is wryly aware. “I’m knocking on one door,” he says, “and just before the person opens it, I run across the street and knock on the door opposite.”