By JENNIFER ABEL
Staff writer

FARMINGTON — Advice for aspiring journalists: if you interview an artist, writer or other creative person, don’t ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” because you run the risk of a sarcastic answer like, “A mail-order house out in Tulsa.”

However, if the creators themselves discuss how they generate ideas, that’s another matter. Six people ­— poets, writers, painters and photographers — met at Tunxis Community College Thursday night in a classroom just around the corner from the Barnes-Franklin Gallery to discuss their work in “100 Days 2009,” a summer challenge for artists to write one piece or create one work of art of their choice every day for 100 days and post the results online.

The six were: Tunxis professors Steve Ersinghaus (a fiction writer) and Corianne Mack Garside (a painter), who are the two co-founders of the event; writer Susan Gibb, poet Neha Bawa, photographer Jessica Somers and sound compositionist John Timmons.

Each artist talked for 15 minutes about their “involvement in the creative process.” Garside, before the evening started, said the enforced discipline of daily deadlines to meet inspired her more than unstructured free time. “‘Do it at your own pace’ doesn’t work for me,” she said. “I need discipline. A whole summer with freedom, I fritter it away.”

However, not all creators found the rigor of deadlines ideal. Bawa said some writers adhere to a strict schedule of writing at a set time and place each day, but “I wasn’t a space-time person. I was a digital space person. I couldn’t write without free-flowing wireless access.”

The project ran from May 29 through Aug. 29 said Ersinghaus. “There were 14 artists in all.”

Garside (before her recent marriage her last name was Mack), said the project actually started the previous summer, in 2008. She and Ersinghaus challenged each other to either write a poem (him) or paint a picture (her) daily over the summer.

“When it all bubbled up word got out, and people got excited about it this year,” Garside said. The results of last year’s project were collected in a book called “100 Days,” available on Blurb.com.

The collected works of all 14 artists (or links to their individual project blogs) are online at Netvibes.com/sersinghaus.